Abstract
In recent years a number of TCP variants have emerged to optimise some aspect of data transport where high delay-bandwidth product paths are common. We evaluate a different scenario - latency-sensitive UDP-based traffic sharing a consumer-grade ‘broadband’ link with one or more TCP flows. In particular we compare Linux implementations of NewReno, H-TCP and CUBIC. We find that dynamic latency fluctuations induced by each TCP variant is a more significant differentiator than ‘goodput’ (useful throughput), and that CUBIC induces far more latency than either H-TCP or NewReno when multiple TCP flows are active concurrently. This potential for ‘collateral damage’ should influence future efforts to re-design TCP for widespread deployment.
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Stewart, L., Armitage, G., Huebner, A. (2009). Collateral Damage: The Impact of Optimised TCP Variants on Real-Time Traffic Latency in Consumer Broadband Environments. In: Fratta, L., Schulzrinne, H., Takahashi, Y., Spaniol, O. (eds) NETWORKING 2009. NETWORKING 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5550. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01399-7_31
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