Root cause analysis for long-lived TCP connections

While the applications using the Internet have changed over time, TCP is still the dominating transport protocol that carries over 90% of the total traffic. Throughput is the key performance metric for long TCP connections. The achieved throughput results from the aggregate effects of the network path, the parameters of the TCP end points, and the application on top of TCP. Finding out which of these factors is limiting the throughput of a TCP connection – referred to as TCP root cause analysis – is important for end users that want to understand the origins of their problems, ISPs that need to troubleshoot their network, and application designers that need to know how to interpret the performance of the application. In this paper, we revisit TCP root cause analysis by first demonstrating the weaknesses of a previously proposed flight-based approach. We next discuss in detail the different possible limitations and highlight the need to account for the application behavior during the analysis process. The main contribution of this paper is a new approach based on the analysis of time series extracted from packet traces. These time series allow for a quantitative assessment of the different causes with respect to the resulting throughput. We demonstrate the interest of our approach on a large BitTorrent dataset.