TCP Bandwidth Sharing - Insights in Fairness and Global Synchronization

TCP bandwidth sharing has been investigated mainly by stochastic approaches due to its seemingly chaotic nature. We show experimentally that the trajectory of sharing flows follows mostly deterministic rules with one exception: The assignment of packet drops to flows. We formulated analytic expressions that accurately describe the experimental traces. As outcome they not only underpin the widely used theorems on TCP performance and buffer dimensioning, but beyond that establish an integral understanding of fairness, convergence, and global synchronization as an indispensable tool for the analysis of new Active Queue Management approaches.