The performance of TCP over ATM on lossy ADSL networks

This paper studies the performance of the transmission control protocol (TCP) over asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) when asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) technology is used in the local loop. TCP can experience performance degradation in this network architecture because of protocol conversion overhead and data losses due to transmission errors. A simulation model is developed to simulate ADSL network components and noisy local loops. The simulation experiments are designed to study the impact of channel errors on TCP performance for unidirectional bulk data transfers, using both an independent error model and a burst error model. The primary performance metrics are cell loss ratio, packet loss ratio, and TCP effective throughput. The simulation results illustrate how TCP is affected by channel errors, as well as the impacts of the TCP maximum segment size (MSS), switch buffer size, bandwidth asymmetry, and the percentage of noisy lines