Analysis of TCP transient behavior and its effect on file transfer latency

In this paper we present a Markov chain for TCP congestion avoidance phase. With this model we are able to analyze congestion window behavior as a discrete-time stochastic process and distinguish between window transient period and steady state. Using this result we are able to obtain more accurate estimate of TCP latency over lossy links compared to existing models. We then simplify the proposed model and show that the transient period evolves with an exponential rate. Our results are validated using NS2 simulation and show significant improvement in latency estimate for a wide range of file sizes.