Experimentally derived interactions between TCP traffic and service quality over DOCSIS cable links

Author

Nguyen, Thuy T T ; Armitage, Grenville J.

Author_Institution

Centre for Adv. Internet Architectures, Swinburne Univ. of Technol., Melbourne, Vic., Australia

Volume

3

fYear

2004

fDate

29 Nov.-3 Dec. 2004

Firstpage

1314

Abstract

We study the effect of upstream (US) and downstream (DS) rate caps and DOCSIS media access on the end-to-end performance of broadband IP services that share a typical home-access ´cable Internet´ link. Our experimental study measures the performance of actual DOCSIS equipment in a typical network configuration. We observe that modestly long lived data transfers in the DS direction can create substantial latency spikes (over 100 ms) in the shared DOCSIS segment, even when the DS rate cap is one or two megabits per second. Such spikes can have a big impact on delay-sensitive applications, such as voice over IP (VoIP), online games and interactive streaming video that may be sharing the DOCSIS link. We also experimentally characterize the impact of US and DS bandwidth asymmetry, MTU sizes, and TCP window sizes in achieving maximum performance over DOCSIS links.

Keywords

IP networks; Internet; broadband networks; quality of service; telecommunication traffic; transport protocols; DOCSIS cable links; QoS; TCP traffic; VoIP; bandwidth asymmetry; broadband IP services; cable Internet link; data over cable service interface specification; delay-sensitive applications; interactive streaming video; latency spikes; media access; online games; rate caps; service quality; voice over IP; Bandwidth; Communication cables; Delay; Hybrid fiber coaxial cables; Internet telephony; Modems; Streaming media; TCPIP; Traffic control; Web and internet services;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Global Telecommunications Conference, 2004. GLOBECOM '04. IEEE

Print_ISBN

0-7803-8794-5

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/GLOCOM.2004.1378199

Filename

1378199