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Institute of Communication Networks and Computer Engineering (IKR)

IKR Publication No 36516

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Publication No 36516

Author(s)

Scharf, M.*; Kiesel, S.*

Title

Head-of-line Blocking in TCP and SCTP: Analysis and Measurements

Topics

Signalling; Internet

Methods

Measurement and Trials; Performance Evaluation

Keywords

ANALYSIS; MEASUREMENT; TCP/IP; ANALYTICAL MODEL; SCTP; SIMCO; TRANSPORT LAYER; PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT; SIGNALLING; END-TO-END DELAY

Abstract

Many signaling protocols in IP networks need a protection against message loss, but they do not require a strict in-sequence data delivery. Since TCP provides reliable in-order transport, end-to-end delays may be unnecessarily increased due to head-of-line blocking. An alternative transport protocol is SCTP, which is optimized for signaling applications and provides mechanisms for reliable, partial-ordered or unordered message delivery. In this paper, we quantify the impact of head-of-line blocking on the response time of transaction-based signaling applications. In order to mitigate this problem, we compare different solutions based on TCP and SCTP. Both a new analytical model and measurements on state-of-the-art operating systems show to which extend SCTP can improve transport delays by leveraging transmission over multiple parallel streams or using unordered data delivery. Our analysis reveals that using one or multiple parallel TCP connections can result in much higher end-to-end delays, even for moderate packet loss probabilities. We also observe significant differences in the TCP performance of different operating systems.

Year

2006

Reference entry

Scharf, M.; Kiesel, S.
Head-of-line Blocking in TCP and SCTP: Analysis and Measurements
Proceedings of the IEEE GLOBECOM 2006, San Francisco, California, November 2006

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Authors marked with an asterisk (*) were IKR staff members at the time the publication has been written.