Steady state and transient state behaviours analyses of TCP connections considering interactions between TCP connections and network

Abstract

The Internet uses a window-based congestion control mechanism in transmission control protocol (TCP). In the literature, there have been a great number of analytical studies on TCP. Most of those studies have focused on the statistical behaviour of TCP by assuming a constant packet loss probability in the network. However, the packet loss probability, in reality, changes according to the packet transmission rates from TCP connections. Conversely, the window size of a TCP connection is dependent on the packet loss probability in the network. In this paper, we explicitly model the interaction between the congestion control mechanism of TCP and the network as a feedback system. By using this model, we analyse the steady state and the transient state behaviours of TCP. We derive the throughput and the packet loss probability of TCP, and the number of packets queued in the bottleneck router. We then analyse the transient state behaviour using a control theoretic approach, showing the influence of the number of TCP connections and the propagation delay on the transient state behaviour of TCP. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.