Exploration and evaluation of traditional TCP congestion control techniques

TCP or Transmission Control Protocol represents one of the prevailing ''languages'' of the Internet Protocol Suite, complementing the Internet Protocol (IP), and therefore the entire suite is commonly referred to as TCP/IP. TCP provides reliability to data transferring in all end-to-end data stream services on the internet. This protocol is utilized by major internet applications such as the e-mail, file transfer, remote administration and world-wide-web. Other applications which do not require reliable data stream service may use the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), which provides a datagram service that emphasizes reduced latency over reliability. The task of determining the available bandwidth of TCP packets flow is in fact, very tedious and complicated. The complexity arises due to the effects of congestion control of both the network dynamics and TCP. Congestion control is an approved mechanism used to detect the optimum bandwidth in which the packets are to be sent by TCP sender. The understanding of TCP behaviour and the approaches used to enhance the performance of TCP in fact, still remain a major challenge. In conjunction to this, a considerable amount of researches has been made, in view of developing a good mechanism to raise the efficiency of TCP performance. The article analyses and investigates the congestion control technique applied by TCP, and indicates the main parameters and requirements required to design and develop a new congestion control mechanism. (C) 2012 King Saud University. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.