TCP vs. TCP: a systematic study of adverse impact of short-lived TCP flows on long-lived TCP flows

— While earlier studies have pointed out that short-lived TCP flows (mice) may hurt long-lived TCP flows (elephants) in the long term, they provide insufficient insight for developing scenarios leading to drastic drop in throughputs of long-lived TCP flows. We have systematically developed TCP adversarial scenarios where we use short-lived TCP flows to adversely influence long-lived TCP flows. Our scenarios are interesting since, (a) they point out the increased vulnerabilities of recently proposed scheduling, AQM and routing techniques that further favor short-lived TCP flows, and (b) they are more difficult to detect when intentionally found to target long-lived TCP flows. We systematically exploit the ability of TCP flows in slow-start to rapidly capture greater proportion of bandwidth compared to long-lived TCP flows in congestion avoidance phase, to a point where they drive long-lived TCP flows into timeout. We use simulations, analysis, and experiments to systematically study t...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: S. Ebrahimi-Taghizadeh, Ahmed Helmy, Sandeep K. S. Gupta
• Keywords: Communications, INFOCOM 2005, Long-lived Tcp, Short-lived Tcp Flows, TCP Flows