The lightening effect of adaptive window control

We consider adaptive window (e.g., TCP) controlled transfer of http-like traffic (i.e., finite volume file transfers starting at random time instants) over a link, and develop an analysis for obtaining the stationary distribution of the link buffer occupancy. The significance of this work is that it provides a framework for analyzing the "closed-loop" behavior of the link buffer under adaptive window controlled transfer of files with a general file size distribution. We find that the tail of the stationary distribution of the buffer occupancy is lighter than may be expected from an open loop analysis. We also find that the tail of the buffer distribution is sensitive to the distribution of the file sizes, which provides insight into the sensitivity of TCP performance to file size distribution.