An Extensive Evaluation of TCP Congestion Control in 10 Gbps Network

In recent years, the sharp growth of data volume has gradually driven communication networks to support more and more high-speed transfers. Accordingly, there are many efforts and interests in researching and developing such high-speed networks. Since Transport Control Protocol (TCP) plays a critical role in reliable communication, it is essential to investigate TCP performance in high-speed environments. This paper performs a measurement and performance analysis of TCP congestion control algorithms (CCAs) in an actual 10 Gbps Ethernet network setup. Unlike the other works, we have extensively investigated 14 CCAs available on Linux kernels in two evaluations: a small number (one and two) of flows and a large, varying number of flows. In the former, we verify CCAs’ responsiveness, fairness, and backward compatibility. In the latter, we measured fairness and throughput under the situation where the number of TCP flows varied by up to 10 flows. The results show that BBR is the best in responsiveness and fairness, while Illinois achieves the best backward compatibility in the two-flow experiments. On the other hand, CDG has the best performance in the evaluations with the large number of flows.