Towards a Common TCP Evaluation Suite

This paper describes a common evaluation suite for the initial evaluation of new TCP extensions. It defines a small number of evaluation scenarios, including traffic and delay distributions, network topologies, and evaluation parameters and metrics. The motivation for such an evaluation suite is that it allows researchers that are proposing new TCP extensions and variants to quickly and easily evaluate their proposals against a common set of well-defined, standard test cases, in order to compare and contrast their proposal against standard TCP as well as other proposed extensions. It will also enable independent duplication and verification of reported results by others, which is an important aspect of the scientific method that is not often put to use by the networking community.