An Experimental Evaluation of CUBIC TCP in a Small Buffer Regime

CUBIC TCP is an enhancement over BIC (Binary Increase Congestion Control) with a cubic window growth function. It has been optimized for high bandwidth-delay product environments and has been the default TCP implementation in Linux since kernel-2.6.18. In this paper, the authors conduct an experimental evaluation of CUBIC TCP in a small buffer regime; i.e. buffers of the order of a few tens of packets. The experiments are carried out using the NetFPGA platform. Their focus is on the interaction of long lived flows, with small buffers, over a range of bandwidth-delay product environments.