Performance Analysis and Improvement of HighSpeed TCP with TailDrop/RED Routers

Abstract

Continuous and explosive growth of the Internet has shown that current TCP mechanisms can obstruct efficient use of high-speed, long-delay networks. To address this problem we propose an enhanced transport-layer protocol called gHSTCP, based on Highspeed TCP proposed by Sally Floyd. It uses two modes in the congestion avoidance phase based on the changing trend of RTT. Simulation results show gHSTCP can significantly improve performance in mixed environments, in terms of throughput and fairness against the traditional TCP Reno flows. However, the performance improvement is limited due to the nature of TailDrop router, and the RED/ARED routers can not alleviate the problem completely. Therefore, we present a modified version of Adaptive RED, called gARED, directed at the problem of simultaneous packet drops by multiple flows in high speed networks. gARED can eliminate weaknesses found in Adaptive RED by monitoring the trend in variation of the average queue length of the router buffer. Our approach, combining gARED and gHSTCP, is quite effective and fair to competing traffic than Adaptive RED with Highspeed TCP.