Transfer Control for Resilient End-to-End Transport

Residing between the network layer and the application layer, the transport layer exchanges application data using the services provided by the network. Given the unreliable nature of the underlying network, reliable data transfer has become one of the key requirements for those transport-layer protocols such as TCP. Studying the various mechanisms developed for TCP to increase the correctness of data transmission while fully utilizing the network's bandwidth provides us a strong background for our study and development of our own resilient end-to-end transport protocol. Given this motivation, in this thesis, we study the different TCP's error control and congestion control techniques by simulating them under different network scenarios using ns-3. For error control, we narrow our research to acknowledgement methods such as cumulative ACK - the traditional TCP's way of ACKing, SACK, NAK, and SNACK. The congestion control analysis covers some TCP variants including Tahoe, Reno, NewReno, Vegas, Westwood, Westwood+, and TCP SACK

A QUIC Implementation for ns-3

Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) is a recently proposed transport protocol, currently being standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It aims at overcoming some of the shortcomings of TCP, while maintaining the logic related to flow and congestion control, retransmissions and acknowledgments. It supports multiplexing of multiple application layer streams in the same connection, a more refined selective acknowledgment scheme, and low-latency connection establishment. It also integrates cryptographic functionalities in the protocol design. Moreover, QUIC is deployed at the application layer, and encapsulates its packets in UDP datagrams. Given the widespread interest in the new QUIC features, we believe that it is important to provide to the networking community an implementation in a controllable and isolated environment, i.e., a network simulator such as ns-3, in which it is possible to test QUIC's performance and understand design choices and possible limitations. Therefore, in this paper we present a native implementation of QUIC for ns-3, describing the features we implemented, the main assumptions and differences with respect to the QUIC Internet Drafts, and a set of examples.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures. Please cite it as A. De Biasio, F. Chiariotti, M. Polese, A. Zanella, M. Zorzi, "A QUIC Implementation for ns-3", Proceedings of the Workshop on ns-3 (WNS3 '19), Firenze, Italy, 201

An Energy-conscious Transport Protocol for Multi-hop Wireless Networks

We present a transport protocol whose goal is to reduce power consumption without compromising delivery requirements of applications. To meet its goal of energy efficiency, our transport protocol (1) contains mechanisms to balance end-to-end vs. local retransmissions; (2) minimizes acknowledgment traffic using receiver regulated rate-based flow control combined with selected acknowledgements and in-network caching of packets; and (3) aggressively seeks to avoid any congestion-based packet loss. Within a recently developed ultra low-power multi-hop wireless network system, extensive simulations and experimental results demonstrate that our transport protocol meets its goal of preserving the energy efficiency of the underlying network.Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (NBCHC050053

Measuring Performance of Web Protocol with Updated Transport Layer Techniques for Faster Web Browsing

The author acknowledges the Electronics Research Group of University of Aberdeen, UK, for all the support in conducting these experiments. This research was completed as a part of the University of Aberdeen, dot.rural project. (EP/G066051/1).Publisher PD

Integration of Linux TCP and Simulation: Verification, Validation and Application

Network simulator has been acknowledged as one of the most flexible means in studying and developing protocol as it allows virtually endless numbers of simulated network environments to be setup and protocol of interest to be fine-tuned without requiring any real-world complicated and costly network experiment. However, depending on researchers, the same protocol of interest can be developed in different ways and different implementations may yield the outcomes that do not accurately capture the dynamics of the real protocol. In the last decade, TCP, the protocol on which the Internet is based, has been extensively studied in order to study and reevaluate its performance particularly when TCP based applications and services are deployed in an emerging Next Generation Network (NGN) and Next Generation Internet (NGI). As a result, to understand the realistic interaction of TCP with new types of networks and technologies, a combination of a real-world TCP and a network simulator seems very essential. This work presents an integration of real-world TCP implementation of Linux TCP/IP network stack into a network simulator, called INET. Moreover, verification and validation of the integrated Linux TCP are performed within INET framework to ensure the validity of the integration. The results clearly confirm that the integrated Linux TCP displays reasonable and consistent dynamics with respect to the behaviors of the real-world Linux TCP. Finally, to demonstrate the application of the INET with Linux TCP extension, algorithms of other Linux TCP variants and their dynamic over a large-bandwidth long-delay network are briefly presented

On detection algorithms for spurious retransmissions in TCP

In TCP, a spurious packet retransmission can be caused by either spurious timeout (STO) or spurious fast retransmit (SFR). The "lost" packets are unnecessarily retransmitted and the evoked congestion control process causes network underutilization. In this paper, we focus on spurious retransmission detection. We first present a survey on some important and interesting spurious retransmission detection algorithms. Based on the insights obtained, we propose a novel yet simple detection algorithm called split-and-retransmit (SnR). SnR only requires a minor modification to the TCP sender while leaving the receiver intact. The key idea is to split the retransmitted packet into two smaller ones before retransmitting them. As the packet size is different, the ACK triggered will carry different ACK numbers. This allows the sender to easily distinguish between the original transmission and the retransmission of a packet without relying on, e.g., TCP options. We then compare our SnR with STODER, F-RTO and Newreno under both loss-free and lossy network environments. We show that our SnR is resilient to packet loss and yields good performance under various simulation settings. ©2010 IEEE.published_or_final_versionThe 2010 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC), Sydney, Australia, 18-21 April 2010. In Proceedings of WCNC, 2010, p. 1-