TY - JOUR AU - Mahdi Alsultani, Hamid Sadeq AU - Kanaan, Qusay AU - Khudhair, Inteasar Yaseen PY - 2018 TI - Empirical Investigation of TCP Incast Congestion in Wireless Cloud Computing Networks JF - Journal of Computer Science VL - 14 IS - 5 DO - 10.3844/jcssp.2018.663.672 UR - https://thescipub.com/abstract/jcssp.2018.663.672 AB - The promising services offered by cloud computing environments have led to huge amount of data that need to be processed and stored. Wireless cloud networks rely on Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) for reliable transfer of data traffic between the cloud end-users and servers and vise-versa. Even though TCP has been successful for several applications, it, however, does not perform well in wireless cloud environments. The many-to-one communication pattern used in such environments with such huge amount of data resulted in TCP incast problem. Transmission Control Protocol incast problem happens in cluster based storage workloads where a lot of end-users communicate simultaneously to a server in the cloud through a bottleneck router, creating buffers overflows which lead to high packet loss. This paper presents an empirical study on TCP incast in current wireless cloud networks and how it is caused. It evaluates TCP-Vegas and TCP-Sack to examine their behaviors and suitability for short-lived connections in terms of queue occupancy level, packet drops, throughput, link utilization and bandwidth unfairness between the TCP connections. It was found that both protocols suffer from high packet loss and link underutilization with comparable throughput.