Quantitative Analytical Performance of TCP Variants in IP and MPLS Networks

Transmission control protocol (TCP) provides reliable end-to-end data communication under unpredictable and dynamic network conditions. Different variants of TCP have been proposed which show varying degree of resilience in best effort IP networks characteristics. Multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) has proven strength in providing quality of service based data services due to its traffic engineering procedures. This paper presents a comprehensive experimental analysis of TCP variants under MPLS with emphasis on Tahoe, Reno and Vegas. Under different traffic load, it has been found that Reno and Tahoe fail to take advantage of MPLS features where as Vegas has shown promising results with almost stable constant end-to-end delay after a transient phase of delay fluctuations in the early stages of data transmission session. The stable end-to-end delay under MPLS makes Vegas an attractive choice for medium to large size real-time traffic.