Modeling TCP behavior in a differentiated services network

Abstract

The differentiated services architecture has been proposed for providing different levels of services and has recently received wide attention. A packet in a diff-serv domain is classified into a class of service according to its contract profile and treated differently by its class, While many studies have addressed issues on the diff-serv architecture (e.g., dropper, marker, classifier and shaper), there have been few attempts to analytically understand a flow's behavior in a diff-serv network. In this paper, we propose simple models of TCP behavior in a diff-serv network. Our models quantitatively characterize TCP throughput as functions of the contract rate, the packet-drop rate and the round-trip time in either two drop precedence or three-drop precedence network. We also extend our models to aggregated flows. The models are validated through a number of simulations.