Evaluation of TCP congestion control algorithms.

Sandia, Los Alamos, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories currently deploy high speed, Wide Area Network links to permit remote access to their Supercomputer systems. The current TCP congestion algorithm does not take full advantage of high delay, large bandwidth environments. This report involves evaluating alternative TCP congestion algorithms and comparing them with the currently used congestion algorithm. The goal was to find if an alternative algorithm could provide higher throughput with minimal impact on existing network traffic. The alternative congestion algorithms used were Scalable TCP and High-Speed TCP. Network lab experiments were run to record the performance of each algorithm under different network configurations. The network configurations used were back-to-back with no delay, back-to-back with a 30ms delay, and two-to-one with a 30ms delay. The performance of each algorithm was then compared to the existing TCP congestion algorithm to determine if an acceptable alternative had been found. Comparisons were made based on throughput, stability, and fairness