On TCP reaction to Explicit Congestion Notification

Abstract

We investigate the behavior of a new response strategy to TCP Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN). The new strategy is more aggressive in the short term, but preserves TCP long term behavior – without modifying the router ECN marking rate. A more aggressive short term behavior gives incentives for hosts to become ECN‐compliant. ECN serves as an early warning sign in this case. Our analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of the new TCP ECN behavior. Simulation results with short/long lived FTP, UDP and HTTP connections, multiple bottleneck configurations, and various TCP flavors and parameters, demonstrate higher throughput and reduced oscillations with the new response strategy.