RTT Prediction in Heavy Tailed Networks

TCP is the most used transport protocol in the Internet and it relies on RTT (Round Trip Time) predictions for the retransmission control algorithm. Most of the algorithms reported in the literature consider memoryless traffic characteristics and do not study the performance under heavy tailed scenarios present in the Internet. In this paper, an algorithm for RTT prediction in a heavy-tailed environment is introduced, and it is shown to follow closely and accurately the actual RTT. The proposed algorithm is simple and permits online implementations. Results are compared with those obtained with other methodologies for real trace sets. It is shown that the proposed algorithm leads to a lower prediction error.