Quantifying the deployment of TCP options - a comparative study

Author

Pentikousis, Kostas ; Badr, Hussein

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci., Stony Brook Univ., NY, USA

Volume

8

Issue

10

fYear

2004

Firstpage

647

Lastpage

649

Abstract

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) performance evaluation studies need to use protocol configurations representative of real networks. However, the actual deployment of TCP options has not yet been quantified on a large scale. After analyzing a large set of traffic traces collected at 12 different monitoring points, we find that TCP segment sizes have a bimodal distribution, not a trimodal one as reported in recent studies. We show that the overwhelming majority of senders employ the maximum segment size option, large windows do not accompany SACK deployment, and explicit congestion notification (ECN) usage is negligible.

Keywords

Internet; statistical distributions; telecommunication congestion control; telecommunication traffic; transport protocols; ECN; Internet traffic; SACK deployment; TCP options deployment; Transmission Control Protocol; bimodal distribution; explicit congestion notification; traffic traces; trimodal distribution; Communication system traffic control; Gain measurement; Internet; Large-scale systems; Monitoring; Performance gain; Portable media players; TCPIP; Transport protocols; Web server; TCP; Trace analysis; Transmission Control Protocol; transport protocols;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Communications Letters, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1089-7798

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/LCOMM.2004.835308

Filename

1343942