Analysing TCP for Bursty Traffic

The Transmission Control Protocol has been designed to support interactive and bulk applications, with performance tuned to support bulk applications that desire to continuously send data. In contrast, this paper analyses TCP performance for a class of applications that do not wish to send continuous data, but instead generate bursts of data separated by application-limited periods in which little or no data is sent. In this context, the paper evaluates an experimental method, Congestion Window Validation (CWV), proposed to mitigate the network impact of bursty TCP applications. Simulation results show that TCP-CWV exhibits a conservative behaviour during application-limited periods. The results also show that TCP-CWV is able to use the available capacity after an idle period over a shared path and that this can have benefit, especially over long delay paths, when compared to slow-start restart specified by standard TCP. The paper recommends the development of CWV-like algorithms to improve the performance for bursty applications while also providing an incentive for application designers to use congestion control.