A stochastic model of TCP/IP with stationary random losses

  • Authors:
  • Eitan Altman;Konstantin Avrachenkov;Chadi Barakat

  • Affiliations:
  • National Research Institute in Informatics and Control (INRIA), 06902 Sophia Antipolis, France;National Research Institute in Informatics and Control (INRIA), 06902 Sophia Antipolis, France;National Research Institute in Informatics and Control (INRIA), 06902 Sophia Antipolis, France

  • Venue:
  • IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

In this paper, we present a model for TCP/IP congestion control mechanism. The rate at which data is transmitted increases linearly in time until a packet loss is detected. At this point, the transmission rate is divided by a constant factor. Losses are generated by some exogenous random process which is assumed to be stationary ergodic. This allows us to account for any correlation and any distribution of inter-loss times. We obtain an explicit expression for the throughput of a TCP connection and bounds on the throughput when there is a limit on the window size. In addition, we study the effect of the Timeout mechanism on the throughput. A set of experiments is conducted over the real Internet and a comparison is provided with other models that make simple assumptions on the inter-loss time process. The comparison shows that our model approximates well the throughput of TCP for many distributions of inter-loss times.