Use of competition detection in TCP for simple topology networks

The fairness (or TCP-friendliness) of recent high-speed TCP proposals for high bandwidth-delay product networks is generally poor. We believe that the lack of TCP-friendliness of high-speed TCP proposals stems from their ineffectiveness in detecting competing TCP flows. We suggest a competition detection mechanism for a single TCP flow to detect the presence of competing TCP flows. We propose a new TCP, called Adaptive TCP (A-TCP) to demonstrate the usefulness of the competition detection mechanism. A-TCP uses the competition detection mechanism to control its aggressiveness: If it does not detect competing flows, a single A-TCP flow increases its sending rate aggressively in order to highly utilize the network. Otherwise, it behaves like a standard TCP flow to fairly share network resources with competing flows. We implemented A-TCP as part of Linux as well as in ns-2. Experimental results show that A-TCP achieves better fairness than existing high-speed TCP proposals when they compete against standard TCP in simple topology networks.