Home // ICIMP 2016, The Eleventh International Conference on Internet Monitoring and Protection // View article

A Study on How to Characterize TCP Congestion Control Algorithms from Unidirectional Packet Traces

Authors:
Toshihiko Kato
Leelianou Yongxialee
Ryo Yamamoto
Satoshi Ohzahata

Keywords: TCP congestion control; passive monitoring; unidirectional trace; congestion window.

Abstract:
Although traffic in the Internet increases largely, it is sometimes pointed out that a small number of giant users exhaust large part of network bandwidth. In order to resolve such problems, a practical way is to suppress large traffic flows which do not conform to Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) congestion control algorithms. For this purpose, the network operators need to infer congestion control algorithms of individual TCP flows using packet traces collected passively in the middle of networks. We proposed, in our previous paper, a new scheme to characterize TCP algorithms from packet traces. It estimates the congestion window size (cwnd) at a TCP sender at round-trip time intervals, and specifies the cwnd growth as a function of the estimated value of cwnd. We showed that our previous scheme can characterize most TCP algorithms introduced recently. In an actual network environment, however, a packet trace captured over some link, especially a backbone link, often contains only unidirectional TCP segments due to the asymmetric routing. In this case, it is difficult to estimate the cwnd itself, and a new analysis scheme is required. This paper shows a study on how to characterize the TCP congestion control algorithms from unidirectional packet traces. We use a data size transmitted during a short period of time and, using it, we apply our former scheme to the unidirectional trace. This paper shows the results that we apply the proposed method to popular TCP algorithms, such as TCP Reno and CUBIC TCP.

Pages: 23 to 28

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2016

Publication date: May 22, 2016

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-3980

ISBN: 978-1-61208-475-6

Location: Valencia, Spain

Dates: from May 22, 2016 to May 26, 2016