Evolution of TCP´s initial window size

Recognizing the upper bound of TCP initial window (IW) size-four segments-too small, researchers have been proposing to increase this. In this context, we observed that given the mice-elephant phenomenon, small flows benefit more from larger IW-size than large flows. This work proposes a simple but effective function to set IW-size for each flow, and investigates a scenario where the decentralized nature of Internet may enforce users to strategically choose right value for some parameter V in function, for improving performance of flows. We develop an evolutionary non-cooperative game-theoretic model to evaluate equilibria points and evolutionary stable strategy that are reached by users. Our game-theoretic results reveal that, there exists an optimal value for V for which small flows achieve better performance. Further our experiments on a testbed confirm that the performance attained by small flows using the proposed function is considerably improved, while not affecting the performance of large flows.