TCP Congestion Control Identification

TL;DR

This paper presents a tool called TBIT that uses active probing to identify TCP congestion control algorithms on web servers, providing insights into their behavior and implementation differences.

Contribution

The paper introduces TBIT, a novel active probing tool specifically designed to determine TCP congestion control algorithms in real-world servers.

Findings

TBIT successfully identifies various TCP congestion control algorithms.

The tool reveals differences in congestion control mechanisms across servers.

Results demonstrate the effectiveness of active probing for TCP analysis.

Abstract

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) carries most of the traffic on the Internet these days. There are several implementations of TCP, and the most important difference among them is their mechanism for controlling congestion. One of the methods for determining type of a TCP is active probing. Active probing considers a TCP implementation as a black box, sends different streams of data to the appropriate host. According to the response received from the host, it figures out the type of TCP version implemented. TCP Behavior Inference Tool (TBIT) is an implemented tool that uses active probing to check the running TCP on web servers. It can check several aspects of the running TCP including initial value of congestion window, congestion control algorithm, conformant congestion control, response to selective acknowledgment, response to Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) and time wait duration. In this paper we focus on congestion control algorithm aspect of it, explain the mechanism used by TBIT and present the results.