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Summary: Understanding the Performance of TCP Pacing
Amit Aggarwal, Stefan Savage, Thomas Anderson
amit, savage, tom @cs.washington.edu
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195 USA
Abstract--Many researchers have observed that TCP's congestion con-
trol mechanisms can lead to bursty traffic flows on modern high-speed
networks, with a negative impact on overall network efficiency. A pro-
posed solution to this problem is to evenly space, or "pace", data sent into
the network over an entire round-trip time, so that data is not sent in a
burst. In this paper, we quantitatively evaluate this approach. Pacing of-
fers better fairness, throughput, and lower drop rates in some situations.
However, we show that contrary to intuition, pacing often has significantly
worse throughput than regular TCP because it is susceptible to synchro-
nized losses and it delays congestion signals. We propose and evaluate ap-
proaches for eliminating this effect.
I. INTRODUCTION
It is well understood from queuing theory that bursty traffic
produces higher queueing delays, more packet losses, and lower
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