2884: Performance Evaluation of Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) in IP Networks.

This memo presents a performance study of the Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) mechanism in the TCP/IP protocol using our implementation on the Linux Operating System. ECN is an end-to-end congestion avoidance mechanism proposed by [6] and incorporated into RFC 2481[7]. We study the behavior of ECN for both bulk and transactional transfers. Our experiments show that there is improvement in throughput over NON ECN (TCP employing any of Reno, SACK/FACK or NewReno congestion control) in the case of bulk transfers and substantial improvement for transactional transfers.