[1][2] TCP Vegas detects congestion at an incipient stage based on increasing Round-Trip Time (RTT) values of the packets in the connection unlike other flavors such as Reno, New Reno, etc., which detect congestion only after it has actually happened via packet loss.
The algorithm depends heavily on accurate calculation of the Base RTT value.
A lot of research is going on regarding the fairness provided by the linear increase/decrease mechanism for congestion control in Vegas.
It is one of a series of efforts at TCP tuning that adapt congestion control and system behaviors to new challenges faced by increases in available bandwidth in Internet components on networks like Internet2.
[7][8] TCP Vegas has been implemented in the Linux kernel,[9] in FreeBSD,[10] in Solaris[11] and possibly in other operating systems as well.