GEN05-5: Use of Competition Detection in TCP for Fair and Effective Utilization of Network Bandwidth

The fairness (or TCP-friendliness) of recent highspeed TCP proposals for high bandwidth-delay product networks is generally poor. We believe that the lack of TCP-friendliness of high-speed TCP proposals stems from their ineffectiveness in detecting competing TCP flows. We suggest a competition detection mechanism for a single TCP flow to detect the presence of competing TCP flows and propose a new TCP, called adaptive TCP (A-TCP), which uses the competition detection mechanism to control its aggressiveness: If it does not detect competing flows, a single A-TCP flow increases its sending rate aggressively in order to highly utilize the network. Otherwise, it behaves like a standard TCP flow to fairly share network resources with competing flows. We implemented A-TCP as part of Linux as well as in ns-2. Experimental results show that A-TCP achieves better fairness than existing high-speed TCP proposals.