A Step Towards Understanding Loss Synchronisation Between Concurrent TCP Flows

Loss synchronisation between concurrent TCP flows could have significant impact on the performance of the Internet. Loss synchronisation could contribute to the unstable behaviour of the Internet and cause long convergence times for some of the newly developed high-performance TCP variants. Loss synchronisation has been frequently reported in simulation-based studies. However, it is not clear about the level of loss synchronisation in the real-world Internet. This paper presents an experimental study of loss synchronisation between concurrent TCP flows over four routing paths (one domestic and three international paths). It suggests that loss synchronisation does exist. However, its scale and level are relatively limited and vary from path to path.