On the impact of the flow-size distribution's tail index on network performance with TCP connections

In this paper, we study the impact of the flow-size distribution on network performance in the case of a single bottleneck with finite buffer. To tackle the case where flows are transmitted with the TCP protocol, we use real experiments and ns-2 simulations. Our preliminary results show that the distribution's tail index impacts the performance in a more complex way than what is reported in existing literature. In particular, we exhibit situations where a heavier tail gives better performance for certain metrics. We argue that a main cause of our observed results is the transient behavior at the beginning of each flow.