Analysis of TCP Performance Metrics Under Varying Network Traffic Conditions

Analysis of TCP Performance Metrics Under Varying Network Traffic Conditions Introduction Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is the backbone of reliable internet communication, handling everything from web browsing to video streaming. Understanding how TCP performs under different network load conditions is critical for network engineers and system administrators. This blog focuses on measuring and analyzing key TCP performance metrics—throughput, goodput, retransmission rate, SACK usage, duplicate ACKs, and out-of-order packets—under three distinct traffic conditions: Normal, Medium, and High. Using hping3 as a traffic generator and Wireshark for packet capture, we observe how TCP congestion control mechanisms respond to increasing network loads and how Selective Acknowledgment (SACK) helps improve reliability. Objectives To measure TCP throughput and goodput under Normal, Medium, and High traffic conditions and analyze the gap caused by retransmissions. To evaluate retransmission be...