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TCP revisited: a fresh look at TCP in the wild

Published: 04 November 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Since the last in-depth studies of measured TCP traffic some 6-8 years ago, the Internet has experienced significant changes, including the rapid deployment of backbone links with 1-2 orders of magnitude more capacity, the emergence of bandwidth-intensive streaming applications, and the massive penetration of new TCP variants. These and other changes beg the question whether the characteristics of measured TCP traffic in today's Internet reflect these changes or have largely remained the same. To answer this question, we collected and analyzed packet traces from a number of Internet backbone and access links, focused on the "heavy-hitter" flows responsible for the majority of traffic. Next we analyzed their within-flow packet dynamics, and observed the following features: (1) in one of our datasets, up to 15.8% of flows have an initial congestion window (ICW) size larger than the upper bound specified by RFC 3390. (2) Among flows that encounter retransmission rates of more than 10%, 5% of them exhibit irregular retransmission behavior where the sender does not slow down its sending rate during retransmissions. (3) TCP flow clocking (i.e., regular spacing between flights of packets) can be caused by both RTT and non-RTT factors such as application or link layer, and 60% of flows studied show no pronounced flow clocking. To arrive at these findings, we developed novel techniques for analyzing unidirectional TCP flows, including a technique for inferring ICW size, a method for detecting irregular retransmissions, and a new approach for accurately extracting flow clocks.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    IMC '09: Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement
    November 2009
    468 pages
    ISBN:9781605587714
    DOI:10.1145/1644893
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 04 November 2009

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    1. network measurement
    2. tcp

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    IMC '09: Internet Measurement Conference
    November 4 - 6, 2009
    Illinois, Chicago, USA

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    • (2021)From Single Lane to Highways: Analyzing the Adoption of Multipath TCP in the Internet2021 IFIP Networking Conference (IFIP Networking)10.23919/IFIPNetworking52078.2021.9472785(1-9)Online publication date: 21-Jun-2021
    • (2021)Throughput Distribution and Stabilization on TCP BBR Connections2021 IEEE 10th International Conference on Cloud Networking (CloudNet)10.1109/CloudNet53349.2021.9657137(91-96)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2021
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