On the effect of the background traffic on TCP's throughput

The utilization of the free capacity by the TCP congestion control is not perfect due to the complex fluctuations of the background traffic resulting in reduced throughput. Different frequency components of the background traffic have different effects on the TCP performance. In this paper we present a comprehensive TCP performance evaluation study to understand the nature of the TCP adaptivity mechanism in frequency domain. Through simulations we analyze the impact of network parameters and also some alternatives for compensation of the throughput reduction. Finally, based also on the analysis of measured TCP traffic we investigate the robustness of TCP to fluctuations occur in actual network traffic.