A flow-based performance analysis of TCP and TCP applications

The most widely used transport layer protocol, TCP, consistently contributes the largest traffic volume in the Internet. The objective of this study is to determine whether there are long-term trends in TCP flows and popular TCP applications from over several years in different organizations. The results show that TCP flows' average packet size has increased steadily and each TCP flow contains slightly more packets year by year. HTTP packets have shorter Round Trip Time (RTT) than HTTPS packets. We also observed that over 60% of TCP flows have very short average packet length. Most TCP flows have reasonably short lifetimes.