An efficient TCP buffer tuning technique based on Packet Loss Ratio (TBT-PLR)

The existing TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) is known to be unsuitable for a network with the characteristics of high BDP(Bandwidth-Delay Product) because of the fixed small or large buffer size at the TCP sender and receiver. Thus, some trial cases of adjusting the buffer sizes automatically with respect to network condition have been proposed to improve the end-to-end TCP throughput. ATBT (Automatic TCP Buffer Tuning) attempts to assure the buffer size of TCP sender according to its current Congestion Window size (CWND), but the ATBT assumes that the buffer size of TCP receiver is maximum value that operating system defines. In DRS(Dynamic Right Sizing), by estimating the TCP arrival data of two times the amount TCP data received previously, the TCP receiver simply reserves the buffer size for the next arrival, accordingly. However, we do not need to reserve exactly two times of buffer size because of the possibility of TCP segment loss. We propose an efficient TCP buffer Tuning technique (called TBT-PLR: TCP Buffer Tuning technique based on packet loss ratio) since we adopt the ATBT mechanism and the TBT-PLR mechanism for the TCP sender and the TCP receiver, respectively. For the purpose of testing the actual TCP performance, we implemented our TBT-PLR by modifying the linux kernel version 2.4.18 and evaluated the TCP performance by comparing TBT-PLR with the TCP schemes of the fixed buffer size. As a result, more balanced usage among TCP connections was obtained.