Modeling TCP Reno performance: a simple model and its empirical validation
Padhye, J.   Firoiu, V.   Towsley, D.F.   Kurose, J.F.  
Dept. of Comput. Sci., Massachusetts Univ., Amherst, MA, USA;
In IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, April 2000, Volume: 8 , Issue: 2
On page(s): 133 - 145


Abstract

The steady-state performance of a bulk transfer TCP flow (i.e., a flow
with a large amount of data to send, such as FTP transfers) may be
characterized by the send rate, which is the amount of data sent by
the sender in unit time. In this paper we develop a simple analytic
characterization of the steady-state send rate as a function of loss
rate and round trip time (RTT) for a bulk transfer TCP flow. Unlike
the models of Lakshman and Madhow (see IEE/ACM Trans. Networking,
vol.5, p.336-50, 1997), Mahdavi and Floyd (1997), Mathis, Semke,
Mahdavi and Ott (see Comput. Commun. Rev., vol.27, no.3, 1997) and by
by Ott et al., our model captures not only the behavior of the fast
retransmit mechanism but also the effect of the time-out
mechanism. Our measurements suggest that this latter behavior is
important from a modeling perspective, as almost all of our TCP traces
contained more time-out events than fast retransmit events. Our
measurements demonstrate that our model is able to more accurately
predict TCP send rate and is accurate over a wider range of loss
rates. We also present a simple extension of our model to compute the
throughput of a bulk transfer TCP flow, which is defined as the amount
of data received by the receiver in unit time.