Revisiting legacy high-speed TCP congestion control variants: An optimisation-theoretic analysis of multi-mode TCP

We revisit the problem of link capacity under-utilisation in TCP Congestion Control (TCP-CC) when working in High-Bandwidth-Delay-Product (High-BDP) networks. We approach this problem using a multi-mode approach and propose TCP-Gentle as an example of TCP-CC that uses this approach. While General Additive Increase Multiplicative Increase (GAIMD) congestion control algorithms received a lot of attention in the literature, little was mentioned about modelling multi-mode GAIMD. To this aim, we provide a tractable optimisation-theoretic model for TCP-Gentle which can be generalised to any multi-mode GAIMD. We show through analysis, simulation, and real-test-bed experiments of single flow, double flow, and single flow with background web traffic, that the proposed TCP-Gentle is competitive with existing TCP variants. Particularly, under certain assumption, TCP-Gentle can outperform TCP-YeAH in terms of fairness to TCP-NewReno. Besides, the proposed TCP-Gentle is more gentle to network; it maintains minimal average queues of less than 1.5% of pipe’s BDP, and reassembles to a great extent a highly-concave congestion window.