Performance Analysis of TCP Congestion Control Algorithms

Abstract — The demand for fast transfer of large volumes of data, and the deployment of the network infrastructures is ever increasing. However, the dominant transport protocol of today, TCP, does not meet this demand because it favors reliability over timeliness and fails to fully utilize the network capacity due to limitations of its conservative congestion control algorithm. The slow response of TCP in fast long distance networks leaves sizeable unused bandwidth in such networks. A large variety of TCP variants have been proposed to improve the connection’s throughput by adopting more aggressive congestion control algorithms. Some of the flavors of TCP congestion control are loss-based, high-speed TCP congestion control algorithms that uses packet losses as an indication of congestion; delay-based TCP congestion control that emphasizes packet delay rather than packet loss as a signal to determine the rate at which to send packets. Some efforts combine the features of loss-based and delay-based algorithms to achieve fair bandwidth allocation and fairness among flows. A comparative analysis between different flavors of TCP congestion control namely Standard TCP congestion control (TCP Reno), loss-based TCP congestion control (HighSpeed TCP, Scalable TCP, CUBIC TCP), delay-based TCP congestion control (TCP Vegas) and mixed loss-delay based TCP congestion control (Compound TCP) is presented here in terns of congestion window verses elapsed time after the connection is established.