Quasiperiodic route to chaotic dynamics of Internet transport protocols

We show that the dynamics of transmission control protocol (TCP) may often be chaotic via a quasiperiodic route consisting of more than two independent frequencies, by employing a commonly used ns-2 network simulator. To capture the essence of the additive increase and multiplicative decrease mechanism of TCP congestion control, and to qualitatively describe why and when chaos may occur in TCP dynamics, we develop a 1D discrete map. The relevance of these chaotic transport dynamics to real Internet connections is discussed.