PERFORMANCE COMPARISON OF THE DIFFERENT STREAMS IN A TCP BOTTLENECK LINK IN THE PRESENCE OF BACKGROUND TRAFFIC IN A DATA CENTER

Abstract

The purpose of this work is the evaluation of the performance of TCP streams when the link that causes a bottleneck is also shared by the background traffic. Standard TCP is the most used protocol which sustains the majority of Internet traffic. Nevertheless, TCP manifests some problems when using almost all of the available bandwidth. Based on these problems, there are recognized different versions of TCP. The aim of this paper is to test the conflict between TCP flows bandwidth allocation. We have implemented a network which includes FTP traffic and background traffic. The TCP flows are simulated so that they begin transmitting at different times. Background traffic is added besides the TCP flows so that we approach a real network model. Besides studying how the TCP flows compete with each other, we will evaluate if the background traffic has an impact on the behavior of TCP flows and if it influences how the available bandwidth is shared equally among flows. We compare standard TCP Tahoe and TCP Reno, which do not differ much between each-other, but use different algorithms so through simulation we will evaluate the changes in the bandwidth they use, even though we expect the TCP flows to be more aggressive in getting bandwidth from other TCP flows.