The adverse impact of the TCP congestion-control mechanism in heterogeneous computing systems

Via experimental study, we illustrate how TCP modulates application traffic in such a way as to adversely affect network performance in a heterogeneous computing system. Even when aggregate application traffic smooths out as more applications' traffic are multiplexed, TCP induces burstiness into the aggregate traffic load, and thus hurts network performance. This burstiness is particularly bad in TCP Reno, and even worse when RED gateways are employed. Based on the results of this experimental study, we then develop a stochastic model for TCP Reno to demonstrate how the burstiness in TCP Reno can be modeled.