Analysis of TCP with several bottleneck nodes

Many works have studied the performance of TCP by modeling the network as a single bottleneck node. We present a more general model taking into account all the nodes on the path not only the main bottleneck. We show that, in addition to the main bottleneck, the other nodes can seriously affect the performance of TCP. They may cause an improvement in the performance by decreasing the burstiness of TCP traffic arriving at the main bottleneck. But, if the buffers in these nodes are not well dimensioned, the congestion may be shifted to them which deteriorates the performance even though they are faster than the main bottleneck. We conclude our analysis by guidelines for the dimensioning of network buffers so as to improve the performance of TCP