Test-Bed Based Comparison of Single and Parallel TCP and the Impact of Parallelism on Throughput and Fairness in Heterogenous Networks

Parallel Transport Control Protocol (TCP) has been used to effectively utilize bandwidth for data intensive applications over high Bandwidth-Delay Product (BDP) networks. On the other hand, it has been argued that, a single based TCP connection with proper modification such as HSTCP can emulate and capture the robustness of parallel TCP and can well replace it. In this work a Comparison between Single-Based and the proposed parallel TCP has been conducted to show the differences in their performance measurements such as throughput performance and throughput ratio, as well as the link sharing Fairness also has been observed to show the impact of using the proposed Parallel TCP on the existing Single-Based TCP connections. The experiment results show that, single-based TCP cannot overcome Parallel TCP especially in heterogeneous networks where the packet losses are common. Furthermore, the proposed parallel TCP does not affect TCP fairness which makes parallel TCP highly recommended to effectively utilize bandwidth for data intensive applications.