TCP Behavior with Many Flows
Robert Morris
Published in the 1997 IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols.
TCP's ability to share a bottleneck fairly and efficiently decreases
as the number of competing flows increases. This effect starts to
appear when there are more flows than packets in the delay-bandwidth
product. In the limit of large numbers of flows, TCP forces a packet
loss rate approaching 50%, causing delays that users are likely to
notice. TCP's minimum congestion window of one packet is the source of
these problems: it causes a few flows to send too fast while the rest
wait in re-transmission time-out. The particular packet loss rate is a
function of TCP's abrupt transition from exponential backoff to
sending with a window of one or more packets, and of the high rate at
which TCP increases small congestion windows.
Analysis of packet traces suggests that these aspects of TCP's
algorithms contribute substantially to the total loss rate observed on
the Internet. One way to work around the problem is to make sure
routers have not just one round-trip time of buffering, but buffering
proportional to the total number of active flows. A more fundamental
cure might make TCP less aggressive and more adaptive when its
congestion window is small.
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