1Upgrading Mice to Elephants: Effects and End-Point Solutions

Abstract — Short TCP flows may suffer significant response-time performance degradations during network congestion. Un-fortunately, this creates an incentive for misbehavior by clients of interactive applications (e.g., gaming, telnet, web): to send “dummy ” packets into the network at a TCP-fair rate even when they have no data to send, thus improving their performance in moments when they do have data to send. Even though no “law ” is violated in this way, a large-scale deployment of such an approach has the potential to seriously jeopardize one of the core Internet’s principles — statistical multiplexing. We quantify, by means of analytical modeling and simulation, gains achievable by the above misbehavior. Our research indicates that easy-to-implement application-level techniques are capable of dramatically reducing incentives for conducting the above transgressions, still without compromising the idea of statistical multiplexing. Index Terms — Interactive application, TCP, retransmission timeout, statistical multiplexing I