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Recent Trends in TCP Packet-Level Characteristics

Authors:
Per Hurtig
Wolfgang John
Anna Brunstrom

Keywords: traffic measurement; TCP; reordering

Abstract:
Up-to-date TCP traffic characteristics are essential for research and development of protocols and applications. This paper presents recent trends observed in 70 measurements on backbone links from 2006 and 2009. First, we provide general characteristics such as packet size distributions and TCP option usage. We confirm previous observations such as the dominance of TCP as transport and higher utilization of TCP options. Next, we look at out-of-sequence (OOS) TCP segments. OOS segments often have negative effects on TCP performance, and therefore require special consideration. While the total fraction of OOS segments is stable in our measurements, we observe a significant decrease in OOS due to packet reordering (from 22.5% to 5.2% of all OOS segments). We verify that this development is a general trend in our measurements and not caused by single hosts/networks or special temporal events. Our findings are surprising as many researchers previously have speculated in an increased amount of reordering.

Pages: 49 to 56

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2011

Publication date: May 22, 2011

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4006

ISBN: 978-1-61208-133-5

Location: Venice/Mestre, Italy

Dates: from May 22, 2011 to May 27, 2011