Comparison of TCP Reno and TCP Vegas via Fluid Approximation

We compare the efficiency of the flow control of two versions of TCP, the transmission control protocol of the Internet: the current version called Reno, and a recently proposed version called Vegas. By means of a fluid approximation, we show that due to the use of round-trip times measurement, the window dynamics of TCP Vegas are much more stable than those of TCP Reno, resulting in a much more efficient utilization of the network resources. In addition, whereas TCP Reno discriminates against users with long propagation delays, TCP Vegas fairly shares the available bandwidth between the users, whatever their propagation delays