TCP Dynamic Behavior

The TCP Dynamic Behavior course is designed for engineers with basic knowledge of TCP/IP that want to strengthen their knowledge and find out about the dynamic behavior of the protocol, i.e. how it behaves with respect to time.

The course contents are summarized in the following bullets:

1. TCP Basics. Quick summary of TCP principles, algorithms and interaction patterns. Useful to bring up the audience's knowledge to the level required for the rest of the course.
2. TCP Congestion Control. This section focuses specifically on how TCP deals with congestion. The most widely used TCP CC algorithm, TCP Reno, is explained in detail. Alternative CC algorithms like TCP Ledbat, TCP Cubic and others are mentioned.
3. End Host characterization. Here we explain what resources and parameters apply to an end host involved in TCP communication with a peer. Things like queues, time-outs, parameters governing TCP algorithms and host performance indicators as well as basic characterization tools are described.
4. IP Network characterization. This section deals with IP router characteristics and network characterization tools.
5. IP Router Dynamic Behavior. In this section we explain how an IP Router behaves with respect to queue management, tackling congestion, and service fairness.
6. Macroscopic Analysis of TCP performance. In this section the mathematical model governing TCP dynamic behavior is explained in detail.
7. Queue build-up. Leveraging the model from the previous section, we'll obtain a model of end host queue build-up and obtain the main characteristics of end-host queues.
8. Expected throughput, latency and jitter. Armed with the knowledge gathered in the previous sections, we learn how to obtain the theoretical throughput, latency and jitter given characterized end-hosts and IP network.
9. Flow aggregation. We'll see from a bird-eye perspective how the IP network deals with TCP traffic from multiple sources and what effects can be expected from traffic aggregation at a router.
10. Application behavior. Here we explain how modern applications use TCP and the consequences that behavior has on the IP network.
11. Variants of CC algorithms: experimental results. In this section the result of experimentation with multiple CC variants on an IP network comprising a radio access stage.
12. Current research topics. An overview of current research on TCP performance . Topics like ECN and fair sharing in the presence of other, potentially non-TCP-friendly protocols are explained in this section.

The course is taught in a minimum of two hours (three if attendants don't have previous knowledge of TCP) with one 5 minutes break per hour.

Course material is free and can be found in SlideShare: