Impact of Background Traffic on the BBR and CUBIC Variants of the TCP Protocol

Abstract

This letter analyzes the performance of the TCP CUBIC and TCP BBR protocols in the presence of background traffic. The analysis is performed via emulation using actual TCP implementations and considering high capacity end-to-end data connections and different connection durations (e.g., mouse and elephant flows). The results indicate that the BBR protocol produces higher throughput and fairness than the CUBIC protocol.