TCP westwood and easy RED to improve fairness in high-speed networks

Abstract

TCP Westwood (TCPW) is a sender-side only modification of TCP Reno congestion control, which exploits end-to-end bandwidth estimation to properly set the values of slow-start threshold and congestion window after a congestion episode. This paper aims at showing via both mathematical modeling and extensive simulations that TCPW significantly improves fair sharing of high-speed networks capacity and that TCPW is friendly to TCP Reno. Moreover, we propose EASY RED, which is a simple Active Queue management (AQM) scheme that improves fair sharing of network capacity especially over high-speed networks. Simulation results show that TCP Westwood provides a remarkable Jain’s fairness index increment up to 200% with respect to TCP Reno and confirm that TCPW is friendly to TCP Reno. Finally, simulations show that Easy RED improves fairness of Reno connections more than RED, whereas the improvement in the case of Westwood connections is much smaller since Westwood already exhibits a fairer behavior by itself.