Abstract
The traditional concept of fairness in TCP is based on being limited by congestion control. Today, however, we see that TCP is being used as transport for interactive applications that have latency requirements. These applications create application-limited, thin streams where retransmissions, rather than congestion control, is the factor controlling the performance of the flow. Keeping the maximum delay as low as possible is crucial to improving the Quality of Experience for interactive, thin-stream applications. As there is little existing work and no clear consensus on how time-dependent, thinstreams should be treated, we attempt to assess how aggressive these thin TCP streams can and should be on retransmission in order to reduce their retransmission latency when loss occurs. In this thesis, we discuss how we have created a Linux networking environment and conducted our experiments in order to find a reasonable trade-off between aggressiveness and fairness. Our findings indicate that an increased aggressiveness can be justified in competition with greedy streams, and we highlight some issues surrounding thin stream behaviour needs to be further studied.