Some observations on the effect of route fluctuation and network link failure on TCP

Network layer phenomena (such as route fluctuations and link failure) occur due to a variety of reasons. While TCP performance and the routing protocol dynamics have been independently studied, their inter-relation has received little attention. We study the interaction between TCP and routing in the presence of link state routing over a number of network topologies. Our observation is that routing changes can cause additional effects such as inevitable false retransmission and data compression in TCP (beyond effects observed in the absence of routing).