Subject: fairness of TCP

From: Tang Oo <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 23 Oct 1998 14:53:21 +0800

Assume that all the IP routers don't use fair queueing scheme. In case of
buffer overflow, the arriving packets are discarded randomly. The window
size will be reduced by half, if a packet of TCP connection is lost.
Comparing a connection with 64k bytes window and another one with 4k bytes
window, the window of the former will be reduced by 32k, but the latter only
2k, if there is loss of both connections. The arrival rate of high speed
connection is higher than a low speed one, so the chance of multiple losses
is much higher for the high speed one. That is, it is more probable for the
window of high speed connection to be dropped multiple times. Is it fair for
it?

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From: Charalambous Charalambos <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 23 Oct 1998 20:24:37 -0500

Well, this is TCP dynamics! High speed connections will suffer more; even more connections with high bandwidth and long delay paths will deliver degraded performance. There are several studies on TCP fairness that are dealing with similar situations. Also, fairness issues arise when different enchanced TCP flavors with different underlying transport technologies are competing for the link.    
________________________________________
Pambos Charalambous, MSEE
Network Engineer
Sprint, Broadband Switch Engineering
phone#(816)854-5445
fax#(816)854-5068
[email-masked]