TCP Vegas

TCP Vegas is a TCP congestion avoidance algorithm that emphasizes packet delay, rather than packet loss, as a signal to help determine the rate at which to send packets. It was developed at the University of Arizona by Lawrence Brakmo and Larry L. Peterson and introduced in 1994.^[1][2]

TCP Vegas detects congestion at an incipient stage based on increasing Round-Trip Time (RTT) values of the packets in the connection unlike other flavors such as Reno, New Reno, etc., which detect congestion only after it has actually happened via packet loss. The algorithm depends heavily on accurate calculation of the Base RTT value. If it is too small then throughput of the connection will be less than the bandwidth available while if the value is too large then it will overrun the connection.

A lot of research is going on regarding the fairness provided by the linear increase/decrease mechanism for congestion control in Vegas. One interesting caveat is when Vegas is inter-operated with other versions like Reno. In this case, performance of Vegas degrades because Vegas reduces its sending rate before Reno, as it detects congestion early and hence gives greater bandwidth to co-existing TCP Reno flows.^[3][4][5][6]

TCP Vegas is one of several "flavors" of TCP congestion avoidance algorithms. It is one of a series of efforts at TCP tuning that adapt congestion control and system behaviors to new challenges faced by increases in available bandwidth in Internet components on networks like Internet2.^[7][8]

TCP Vegas has been implemented in the Linux kernel,^[9] in FreeBSD,^[10] in Solaris^[11] and possibly in other operating systems as well.^{[citation needed]}

See also

• TCP congestion avoidance algorithm
• Development of TCP

References

1. Princeton University - Technical Reports - Computer Science - Understanding TCP Vegas: Theory and Practice
2. Adaptive Vegas: A Solution of Unfairness Problem for TCP Vegas Information networking: convergence in broadband and mobile networking By Cheeha Kim
3. University of California at Berkeley - Issues in TCP Vegas
4. TCP Vegas: New Techniques for Congestion Detection and Avoidance - CiteSeer page on the 1994 SIGCOMM paper by Lawrence Brakmo, Sean W. O'Malley, and Larry L. Peterson
5. 4.3 TCP-Vegas The mathematics of Internet congestion control By Rayadurgam Srikant
6. 5.4.5 TCP Vegas An Analytical Approach to Optical Burst Switched Networks By T. Venkatesh, C. Siva Ram Murthy
7. Lawrence S. Brakmo and Larry L. Peterson - TCP Vegas: End to End Congestion Avoidance on a Global Internet
8. TCP Vegas: End to End Congestion Avoidance on a Global Internet - CiteSeer page on the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications paper by Lawrence Brakmo and Larry L. Peterson
9. Neal Cardwell - A TCP Vegas Implementation for Linux
10. - FreeBSD commit revision 218152
11. - Oracle Solaris Administration: IP Services : Network Congestion and Congestion Control

External links

• University of Arizona – Advanced Protocol Design – Vegas^{[dead link‍]}