Investigating TCP Single Source Behavior in Time-Varying Capacity Network Scenarios

Some recent simulation works have pointed out that TCP, today the most widespread transport protocol in the Internet, appears to suffer the variability of the available bandwidth when it shares the network resources with higher priority traffic. This paper describes an analytic model able to reproduce TCP behavior under a time-varying available capacity. The aim is to investigate the interaction between TCP and high-priority real-time traffic (e.g., voice and video). The accuracy of the model against simulations is shown to be satisfactory and superior with respect to other popular TCP models in a definite range of network scenar-ios. Besides, by means of the proposed model and the several simulations carried out in this work we gain an interesting insight on TCP behavior in the considered network environment.