Providing fairness between TCP NewReno and TCP Vegas with RD network services

Abstract

While Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) variants with delay-based congestion control (e.g., TCP Vegas) provide low queueing delay and low packet loss, the key problem with their deployment on the Internet is their relative performance when competing with traditional TCP variants with loss-based congestion control (e.g., TCP NewReno). In particular, the more aggressive loss-based flows tend to dominate link buffer usage and degrade the throughput of delay-based flows. In this paper, we study a novel approach for achieving fair sharing of the network resources among TCP variants, using Rate-Delay (RD) Network Services. In particular, loss-based and delay-based flows are isolated from each other and served via different queues. Using extensive ns-2 network simulation experiments, we show that our approach is effective in providing fairness between loss-based NewReno and delay-based Vegas flows.