On TCP performance in a heterogeneous network: a survey

Transmission media carrying Internet traffic present a wide range of characteristics, some of which, such as transmission errors, long end-to-end delay, and bandwidth asymmetry, may cause a degradation of the TCP performance. Many works have studied the performance of TCP over these media, most of which focus on a particular network type. In this work we study TCP performance independent of the type of network by considering the different possible characteristics of the connection path. We present the problems and the different proposed solutions. This study permits us to understand the limitations of the actual solutions and the required modifications to let TCP cope with a heterogeneous Internet on an end-to-end basis.