We describe FAST TCP, a new TCP congestion control algorithm for high-speed long-latency networks, from design to implementation. We highlight the approach taken by FAST TCP to address the four difficulties, at both packet and flow levels, which the current TCP implementation has at large windows. We describe the architecture and characterize the equilibrium and stability properties of FAST TCP. We present experimental results comparing our first Linux prototype with TCP Reno, HSTCP, and STCP in terms of throughput, fairness, stability, and responsiveness. FAST TCP aims to rapidly stabilize high-speed long-latency networks into steady, efficient and fair operating points, in dynamic sharing environments, and the preliminary results are promising.

The scenario is that a bulk data transfer is being performed over a TCP connection, from a host on a local area network (LAN) to a mobile host attached to the LAN by a radio link. In earlier work [10] we had assumed that packet losses in a TCP connection over a radio link are statistically independent. In this paper, we extend this analysis to a Rayleigh fading link, which we model by a two state Markov model. The bulk throughputs of TCP-OldTahoe and TCP-Tahoe are compared with and without fading, for various average signal-to-noise ratios. We also study the performance with a link protocol on the wireless link, and study the effect of varying the link packet size, the number of link packet attempts, and the vehicle speed. For the parameters of the BSD UNIX implementation, over a 1.5Mbps wireless link, we find that, with fading, a signal-to-noise ratio of at least 30dB is required to get reasonable throughput with TCP Tahoe or OldTahoe; this corresponds to at least 100 ti...

We present a new implementation of TCP that is better suited to today's Internet than TCP Reno or Tahoe. Our implementation of TCP, which we call TCP Santa Cruz, is designed to work with path asymmetries, out-of-order packet delivery, and networks with lossy links, limited bandwidth and dynamic changes in delay. The new congestion-control and error-recovery mechanisms in TCP Santa Cruz are based on: using estimates of delay along the forward path, rather than the round-trip delay; reaching a target operating point for the number of packets in the bottleneck of the connection, without congesting the network; and making resilient use of any acknowledgments received over a window, rather than increasing the congestion window by counting the number of returned acknowledgments. We compare TCP Santa Cruz with the Reno and Vegas implementations using the ns2 simulator. The simulation experiments show that TCP Santa Cruz achieves significantly higher throughput, smaller delays, and smaller del...

We demonstrate that the dynamic behavior of queue and average window is determined predominantly by the stability of TCP/RED, not by AIMD probing nor noise tra#c. We develop a general multi-link multi-source model for TCP/RED and derive a local stability condition in the case of a single link with heterogeneous sources. We validate our model with simulations and illustrate the stability region of TCP/RED. These results suggest that TCP/RED becomes unstable when delay increases, or more strikingly, when link capacity increases. The analysis illustrates the di#culty of setting RED parameters to stabilize TCP: they can be tuned to improve stability, but only at the cost of large queues even when they are dynamically adjusted.

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We survey some recent results on modeling, analysis and design of congestion control schemes for the Internet. Using tools from convex optimization and control theory, we show that congestion controllers can be viewed as distributed algorithms for achieving fair resource allocation among competing sources. We illustrate the use of simple mathematical models to analyze the behavior of currently deployed Internet congestion control protocols as well as to design new protocols for networks with large capacities, delays and general topology. These new protocols are designed to nearly eliminate loss and queueing delay in the Internet, yet achieving high utilization and any desired fairness.

We show that the current TCP Vegas algorithm can become unstable in the presence of network delay and propose a modification that stabilizes it. The stabilized Vegas remains completely source-based and can be implemented without any network support. We suggest an incremental deployment strategy for stabilized Vegas when the network contains a mix of links, some with active queue management and some without.

This paper describes our experiences in the development of the UDP-based Data Transport (UDT) protocol, an application level transport protocol used in distributed data intensive applications. The new protocol is motivated by the emergence of wide area high-speed optical networks, in which TCP is often found to fail to utilize the abundant bandwidth. UDT demonstrates good efficiency and fairness (including RTT fairness and TCP friendliness) characteristics in high performance computing applications where a small number of bulk sources share the abundant bandwidth. It combines both rate and window control and uses bandwidth estimation to determine the control parameters automatically. This paper presents the rationale behind UDT: how UDT integrates these schemes to support high performance data transfer, why these schemes are used, and what the main issues are in the design and implementation of this high performance transport protocol.

Wide-area distributed applications are frequently limited by the performance of Internet data transfer. We argue that the principle cause of this effect is the poor interaction between host-centric congestion control algorithms and the realities of today's Internet traffic and infrastructure. In particular, when the duration of a network flow is short, then using end-to-end feedback to determine network conditions will be extremely inefficient. We propose an incremental approach to the problem, in which congestion information is shared among many co-located hosts and transport protocols make informed congestion control decisions. We argue that the resulting system can potentially improve the performance experienced by each network user as well as the overall efficiency of the network. 1 Introduction While there has been considerable research invested in mitigating the effects of inadequate memory performance[22, 5], disk performance [23, 24], and LAN performance [34], for the growing ...

Current optical networks are migrating to wavelength division multiplexing (WDM)-based fiber transport between traditional electronic multiplexers/demultiplexers, routers, and switches. Passive optical add--drop WDM networks have emerged but an optical data network that makes full use of the technologies of dynamic optical routing and switching exists only in experimental test-beds. This paper will discuss architecture and technology issues for the design of high performance optical data networks with two classes of technologies, WDM and time division multiplexing (TDM). The WDM network architecture presented will stress WDM aware internet protocol (IP), taking full advantage of optical reconfiguration, optical protection and restoration, traffic grooming to minimize electronics costs, and optical flow-switching for large transactions. Special attention is paid to the access network where innovative approaches to architecture may have a significant cost benefit. In the more distant future, ultrahigh-speed optical TDM networks, operating at single stream data rates of 100 Gb/s, may offer unique advantages over WDM networks. These advantages may include the ability to provide integrated services to high-end users, multiple qualityof -service (QoS) levels, and truly flexible bandwidth-on-demand. We will give an overview of an ultrahigh-speed TDM network architecture and describe recent key technology developments such as high-speed sources, switches, buffers, and rate converters. Index Terms---Optical data processing, optical fiber communication, optical fiber LAN, optical signal processing, time division multiaccess, time division multiplexing, wavelength division multiplexing. I.