TCP in presence of bursty losses

In this paper we analyze the performance of a TCP-like flow control mechanism in a lossy environment. The transmission rate in the control scheme that we consider has a linear growth rate; whenever a loss occurs, the transmission rate is halved. This approximates the performance of several versions of TCP that divide their congestion window by two when a loss is detected. We propose a mathematical model that allows to account for burstiness in the loss process. We compute the expected transmission rate and its moments at some potential loss instants, and provide useful implicit and explicit expressions for the Laplace Stieltjes transform. This allows us to compute explicitly the time average of the transmission rate as well as its moments. We show that the time average of the transmission rate is indeed sensitive to the distribution of losses, and not just to the average loss rate: for a given average loss rate, we show that the time average of the transmission rate increases with the burstiness of losses.