Experimental Evaluation of TCP Implementations on Linux/Windows Platforms

Although new TCP congestion control algorithms have been proposed for high-speed network in recent years, standard TCP is still the most widely used on the Internet. The performance of applications strongly depends on the behavior of TCP, especially the TCP congestion control algorithms. As different operating systems may implement standard TCP differently in detail, our objective is to investigate and compare the performance of standard TCP implementations on different operating systems, particularly on Windows 7 and Linux. In this paper, we introduce our experimental methodology and show some exemplary results in our experiments in terms of throughput, fairness and so forth. Surprisingly, we find that TCP implementation in Linux probes slightly less packet drop than Windows 7, however, it increases the congestion window slower than Windows 7. Moreover, intra-implementation flows or inter-implementation flows are generally fair in both Windows 7 and Linux. More differences in detail are also found in the paper.