TCP throughput analysis under transmission error and congestion losses

This paper analyzes the performance of a large population of long lived TCP flows experiencing random packet losses due to both random transmission errors and congestion created by the sharing of a common tail drop bottleneck router. We propose a natural and simple model for the joint throughput evolution of the set of TCP sessions under such a mix of losses. For the case of Poisson transmission errors, we show that the asymptotic model where the population tends to infinity leads to a well defined and tractable dynamical system. In particular, we get the mean value of the throughput of each session as a function of the transmission error rate and the synchronization rate in the bottleneck router. The large population asymptotic model has two interesting and non-intuitive properties: 1) there exists a positive threshold (given in closed form) on the transmission error rate above which there are no congestion losses at all in steady state; 2) below this threshold, the mean throughput of each flow is an increasing function of the transmission error rate, so that the maximum mean value is in fact achieved when the transmission error rate is equal to this threshold. The finite population model and models based on other classes of point processes are also studied. In particular, a sufficient condition is obtained for the existence of congestion times in the case of arbitrary transmission error point processes.