A study of fairness among heterogeneous TCP variants over 10 Gbps high-speed optical networks

Abstract

Several high-speed TCP variants are adopted by end users and therefore, heterogeneous congestion control has become the characteristic of newly emerging high-speed optical networks. In contrast to homogeneous TCP flows, fairness among heterogeneous TCP flows now depends on router parameters such as queue management scheme and buffer size. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study of fairness performance among heterogeneous TCP variants over a 10Gbps high-speed optical network environment. Our evaluation scenarios for heterogeneous TCP flows consist of TCP variants with substantial presence in current Internet; therefore, TCP-SACK, CUBIC TCP (CUBIC) and HighSpeed TCP (HSTCP) compete for bottleneck bandwidth. Experimental results for fairness are presented for different queue management schemes, such as Drop-tail, Random Early Detection (RED), CHOose and Keep for responsive flows CHOose and Kill for unresponsive flows (CHOKe), and Approximate Fair Dropping (AFD), with varying degree of buffer sizes. We observe heterogeneous TCP flows induce more unfairness than homogeneous ones. Active queue management (AQM) schemes, RED, CHOKe, and AFD, improve fairness for large buffer sizes as compared to Drop-tail, whereas AQM schemes lose the fairness advantage for small buffer sizes. This study provides preliminary results for fairness challenges to deploy all-optical routers with limited buffer size.