Performance sensitivity and fairness of ECN-aware ‘modified TCP’

The paper discusses how explicit congestion notification (ECN) can be used to devise an Internet congestion control mechanism that is more rapidly reactive and allows best-effort flows to rapidly adjust to fluctuations in available capacity. Our ECN-mod protocol involves simple modifications to TCP behavior and leverages more aggressive marking-based router feedback. Simulations show that ECN-mod is better than TCP NewReno for both persistent sources and Web-style intermittent traffic sources, and makes the link utilization significantly less sensitive to the variation in the number of active flows. Simulations also show that, while ECN-mod flows obtain a larger portion of the available capacity than conventional best-effort traffic, they do not starve or significantly penalize such TCP-based flows.