Test-Bed based Comparison of Single and Parallel TCP and the Impact Of Parallelism on Throughput and Fairness in Heterogenous Networks

TL;DR

This paper compares single and parallel TCP using test-beds, demonstrating that parallel TCP outperforms single TCP in throughput and fairness, especially in heterogeneous networks with packet loss.

Contribution

It provides an empirical comparison showing the advantages of parallel TCP over single TCP in throughput and fairness in diverse network conditions.

Findings

Parallel TCP achieves higher throughput than single TCP.

Parallel TCP maintains fairness similar to single TCP.

Parallel TCP is recommended for data-intensive applications in heterogeneous networks.

Abstract

Parallel Transport Control Protocol (TCP) has been used to effectively utilize bandwidth for data intensive applications over high Bandwidth-Delay Product (BDP) networks. On the other hand, it has been argued that, a single-based TCP connection with proper modification such as HSTCP can emulate and capture the robustness of parallel TCP and can well replace it. In this work a Comparison between Single-Based and the proposed parallel TCP has been conducted to show the differences in their performance measurements such as throughput performance and throughput ratio, as well as the link sharing Fairness also has been observed to show the impact of using the proposed Parallel TCP on the existing Single-Based TCP connections. The experiment results show that, single-based TCP cannot overcome Parallel TCP especially in heterogeneous networks where the packet losses are common. Furthermore, the proposed parallel TCP does not affect TCP fairness which makes parallel TCP highly recommended to effectively utilize bandwidth for data intensive applications.