Local stability and Hopf bifurcation analysis for Compound TCP

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the local stability and Hopf bifurcation phenomena in Compound TCP with small Drop-tail buffers across various network topologies, providing conditions for stability and insights into limit cycle behavior.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive analytical framework for stability analysis and bifurcation characterization of Compound TCP in different network configurations.

Findings

Conditions for stability derived for each topology.

Identification of Hopf bifurcation points leading to limit cycles.

Packet-level simulations confirm the existence and stability of limit cycles.

Abstract

We conduct a local stability and Hopf bifurcation analysis for Compound TCP, with small Drop-tail buffers, in three topologies. The first topology consists of two sets of TCP flows having different round trip times, and feeding into a core router. The second topology corresponds to two queues in tandem, and consists of two distinct sets of TCP flows, regulated by a single edge router and feeding into a core router. The third topology comprises of two distinct sets of TCP flows, regulated by two separate edge routers, and feeding into a common core router. For each of these cases, we conduct a detailed local stability analysis and obtain conditions on the network and protocol parameters to ensure stability. If these conditions get marginally violated, our analysis shows that the underlying systems would lose local stability via a Hopf bifurcation. After exhibiting a Hopf, a key concern is to determine the asymptotic orbital stability of the bifurcating limit cycles. We present a detailed analytical framework to address the stability of the limit cycles, and the type of the Hopf bifurcation by invoking Poincare normal forms and the center manifold theory. We conduct packet-level simulations to highlight the existence and stability of the limit cycles in the queue size dynamics.