Performance Analysis of TCP Incast with TCP Lite and Abstract TCP

Data center networks widely uses TCP for communication between the servers as it provides reliability and congestion control. However, TCP does not work well for certain type of communication patterns. One such a pattern is barrier synchronized many to one communication. During this type of data transmissions, multiple servers simultaneously transmits data to a single client and also the client cannot issues its next request until it receives all the data from current transmission. This will leads to severe throughput collapse in the networks which is called as TCP Incast. There are numerous other variants of TCP which will provides better congestion avoidance than TCP. In this paper, we analyze the performance of TCP Incast using QualNet simulator with different TCP variants namely TCP Lite and Abstract TCP. The performance analysis is based on the metrics such as bytes received, throughput, packet loss and number of retransmission.