On the Burstiness of the TCP Congestion-Control Mechanism in a Distributed Computing System

Several studies in network traffic characterization have concluded that network traffic is self-similar and therefore not readily amenable to statistical multiplexing in a distributed computing system. This paper examines the effects of the TCP protocol stack on network traffic via an experimental study on the different implementations of TCP. We show that even when aggregate application traffic smooths out as more applications’ traffic are multiplexed, TCP introduces burstiness into the aggregate traffic load, reducing network performance when statistical multiplexing is used within the network gateways.