On the impact of bursting on TCP performance

Abstract

Periodically in the transport protocol research community, the idea of introducing a burst mitigation strategy is voiced. In this paper we assess the prevalence and implications of bursts in the context of real TCP traffic in order to better inform a decision on whether TCP's congestion control algorithms need to incorporate some form of burst suppression. After analyzing traffic from three networks, we find that bursts are fairly rare and only large bursts (of hundreds of segments) cause loss in practice. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.