When to use and when not to use BBR

Abstract

This short paper presents a detailed empirical study of BBR's performance under different real-world and emulated testbeds across a range of network operating conditions. Our empirical results help to identify network conditions under which BBR outperforms, in terms of goodput, contemporary TCP congestion control algorithms. We find that BBR is well suited for networks with shallow buffers, despite its high retransmissions, whereas existing loss-based algorithms are better suited for deep buffers.