<title>TCP with source traffic shaping (TCP-STS): an approach for network congestion reduction</title>

Abstract

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), provides flow control functions which are based on the window mechanism. Packet losses are detected by various mechanisms, such as timeouts and duplicate acknowledgements, and are then recovered from using different techniques. A problem that arises with the use of window based mechanisms is that the availability of a large number of credits at the source may cause a source to flood the network with back-to-back packets, which may drive the network into congestion, especially if multiple sources become active at the same time. In this paper we propose a new approach for congestion reduction. The approach works by shaping the traffic at the TCP source, such that the basic TCP flow control mechanism is still preserved, but the packet transmissions are spaced in time in order to prevent a sudden surge of traffic from overflowing the routers' buffers. Simulation results show that this technique can result in an improved network performance, in terms of reduced mean delay, delay variance, and packet dropping ratio.