On the Fairness of TCP Throughput Under Loss

There have been a number of efforts devoted to predicting or modeling TCP performance under the presence of various network defects with a statistic such as average TCP throughput. While the average TCP throughput is useful, it does not provide insight on the variability of results that may be seen across multiple end users. This paper reports on a simulation study to characterize the distribution of TCP throughput performance across multiple users sharing a bottleneck link using fairness as a metric. In particular, the sensitivity of the results is explored when considering variations in the numbers of clients sharing the bottleneck link and the effects of loss in the network experienced by an individual client.