Collateral Damage: The Impact of Optimised TCP Variants on Real-Time Traffic Latency in Consumer Broadband Environments

Authors:
Lawrence Stewart;Grenville Armitage;Alana Huebner
Affiliations:
Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia;Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia;Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia
Venue:
NETWORKING '09 Proceedings of the 8th International IFIP-TC 6 Networking Conference
Year:
2009

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Abstract

In recent years a number of TCP variants have emerged to optimise some aspect of data transport where high delay-bandwidth product paths are common. We evaluate a different scenario - latency-sensitive UDP-based traffic sharing a consumer-grade `broadband' link with one or more TCP flows. In particular we compare Linux implementations of NewReno, H-TCP and CUBIC. We find that dynamic latency fluctuations induced by each TCP variant is a more significant differentiator than `goodput' (useful throughput), and that CUBIC induces far more latency than either H-TCP or NewReno when multiple TCP flows are active concurrently. This potential for `collateral damage' should influence future efforts to re-design TCP for widespread deployment.