A case for exploiting self-similarity of network traffic in TCP congestion control

dAnalytical and empirical studies have shown that self-similar traffic can have detrimental impact on network performance including amplified queuing delay and packet loss ratio. On the flip side, the ubiquity of scale-invariant burstiness observed across diverse networking contexts can be exploited to better design resource control algorithms. In this paper, we explore the issue of exploiting the self-similar characteristics of network traffic in TCP congestion control. We show that the correlation structure present in long-range dependent traffic can be detected on-line and used to predict the future traffic. We then devise a novel scheme, called TCP with traffic prediction (TCP-TP), that exploits the prediction result to infer, in the context of AIMD steady-state dynamics, the optimal operational point at which a TCP connection should operate. Through analytical reasoning, we show that the impact of prediction errors on fairness is minimal. We also conduct ns-2 simulation and FreeBSD 4.1-based implementation studies to validate the design and to demonstrate the performance improvement in terms of packet loss ratio and throughput attained by connections. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.