A mean-field analysis of short lived interacting TCP flows

In this paper, we consider a set of HTTP flows using TCP over a common drop-tail link to download files. After each download, a flow waits for a random think time before requesting the download of another file, whose size is also random. When a flow is active its throughput is increasing with time according to the additive increase rule, but if it suffers losses created when the total transmission rate of the flows exceeds the link rate, its transmission rate is decreased. The throughput obtained by a flow, and the consecutive time to download one file are then given as the consequence of the interaction of all the flows through their total transmission rate and the link’s behavior. We study the mean-field model obtained by letting the number of flows go to infinity. This mean-field limit may have two stable regimes : one without congestion in the link, in which the density of transmission rate can be explicitly described, the other one with periodic congestion epochs,...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: SIGMETRICS
• Authors: François Baccelli, Augustin Chaintreau, Danny De Vleeschauwer, David R. McDonald
• Keywords: Common Drop-tail Link, SIGMETRICS 2004, Total Transmission Rate, Transmission Rate