TCP Feno: Enhancement for higher accuracy of loss differentiation over small buffer heterogeneous networks

It is well known that TCP shows performance degradation over wired/wireless networks since TCP regards packet loss as network congestion. TCP Veno has successfully addressed this fundamental problem by proposing an end-to-end loss differentiation algorithm, which distinguishes the cause of packet loss by the number of packets in the router buffer. Unfortunately, Veno's algorithm shows very low accuracy on small buffer routers that are emerging recently as a new challenge for Internet routers. In the small buffer networks, routers can overflow easily in a short time although Veno diagnoses wireless loss, and this leads to the failure in loss differentiation. Furthermore, when congestion loss is misdiagnosed as wireless loss, Veno shows poor Reno-friendliness since it can increase sending rate by setting ssthresh to a larger value than Reno. In this paper, we propose a more accurate loss differentiation algorithm for small buffer heterogeneous networks. Our algorithm accurately distinguishes wireless and wired packet loss by newly defining congestive rate. Through extensive network simulations, we confirm that our new TCP Feno achieves not only higher accuracy, but also better Reno-friendliness while not losing performance efficiency.