frawi / acto15-tcpicw

Student project for the "Actual Topics" lecture: Impact of TCP's Initial Congestion Window

Impact of TCP's Initial Congestion Window

TCP flows start with an initial congestion window of at most three segments or about 4KB of data. Because most Web transactions are short-lived, the initial congestion window is a critical TCP parameter in determining how quickly flows can finish. To optimize the user experience for Web transactions it has been suggested to increase the initial congestion window.

The task is to investigate the impact of the congestion window size on the throughput of short lived transactions. Mininet should be used for the experimental setup. The performance for different initial congestion window sizes and transaction times should be measured with iperf. The results should then be presented with a graph.