ResTP: A Configurable and Adaptable Multipath Transport Protocol for Future Internet Resilience

Motivated by the shortcomings of common transport protocols, e.g., TCP, UDP, and MPTCP, in modern networking and the belief that a general-purpose transport-layer protocol, which can operate efficiently over diverse network environments while being able to provide desired services for various application types, we design a new transport protocol, ResTP. The rapid advancement of networking technology and use paradigms is continually supporting new applications. The configurable and adaptable multipath-capable ResTP is not only distinct from the standard protocols by its flexibility in satisfying the requirements of different traffic classes considering the characteristics of the underlying networks, but by its emphasis on providing resilience. Resilience is an essential property that is unfortunately missing in the current Internet. In this dissertation, we present the design of ResTP, including the services that it supports and the set of algorithms that implement each service. We also discuss our modular implementation of ResTP in the open-source network simulator ns-3. Finally, the protocol is simulated under various network scenarios, and the results are analyzed in comparison with conventional protocols such as TCP, UDP, and MPTCP to demonstrate that ResTP is a promising new transport-layer protocol providing resilience in the Future Internet (FI)

Enhancing QUIC over Satellite Networks

The use of Satellite Communication (SATCOM) networks for broadband connectivity has recently seen an increase in popularity due to, among other factors, the rise of the latest generations of cellular networks (5G/6G) and the deployment of high-throughput satellites. In parallel, major advances have been witnessed in the context of the transport layer: first, the standardization and early deployment of QUIC, a new-generation and general-purpose transport protocol; and second, modern congestion control proposals such as the Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip propagation time (BBR) algorithm. Even though satellite links introduce several challenges for transport layer mechanisms, mainly due to their long propagation delay, satellite Internet providers have relied on TCP connection-splitting solutions implemented by Performance-Enhancing Proxies (PEPs) to greatly overcome many of these challenges. However, due to QUIC's fully encrypted nature, these performance-boosting solutions become nearly impossible for QUIC traffic, leaving it in great disadvantage when competing against TCP-PEP. In this context, IETF QUIC WG contributors are currently investigating this matter and suggesting new solutions that can help improve QUIC's performance over SATCOM. This thesis aims to study some of these proposals and evaluate them through experimentation using a real network testbed and an emulated satellite link

Enhanced transport protocols for real time and streaming applications on wireless links

Real time communications have, in the last decade, become a highly relevant component of Internet applications and services, with both interactive communications and streamed content being used in developed and developing countries alike. Due to the proliferation of mobile devices, wireless media is becoming the means of transmitting a large part of this increasingly important real time communications traffic. Wireless has also become an important technology in developing countries, with satellite communications being increasingly deployed for traffic backhaul and ubiquitous connection to the Internet. A number of issues need to be addressed in order to have an acceptable service quality for real time communications in wireless environments. In addition to this, the availability of multiple wireless interfaces on mobile devices presents an opportunity to improve and further exacerbates the issues already present on single wireless links. Therefore in this thesis, we consider improvements to transport protocols for real time communications and streaming services to address these problems and we provide the following contributions. To deal with wireless link issues of errors and delay, we propose two enhancements. First, an improvement technique for Datagram Congestion Control Protocol CCID4 for long delay wireless (e.g. satellite) links, demonstrating significant performance improvements for Voice over IP applications. To deal with link errors, we have proposed, implemented and evaluated an erasure coding based packet error correction approach for Concurrent Multipath Transfer extension of Stream Control Transport Protocol data transport over multiple wireless paths. We have identified packet reordering as a major cause of performance degradation in both single and multi-path transport protocols for real time communications and media streaming. We have proposed a dynamically resizable buffer based solution to mitigate this problem within the DCCP protocol. For improving the performance of multi-path transport protocols over dissimilar network paths, we have proposed a delay aware packet scheduling scheme, which significantly improves the performance of multimedia and bulk data transfer with CMT-SCTP in heterogeneous multi-path network scenarios. Finally, we have developed a tool for online streaming video quality evaluation experiments, comprising a real-time cross-layer video streaming technique implemented within an open-source H.264 video encoder tool called x264

STCP: A New Transport Protocol for High-Speed Networks

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is the dominant transport protocol today and likely to be adopted in future high‐speed and optical networks. A number of literature works have been done to modify or tune the Additive Increase Multiplicative Decrease (AIMD) principle in TCP to enhance the network performance. In this work, to efficiently take advantage of the available high bandwidth from the high‐speed and optical infrastructures, we propose a Stratified TCP (STCP) employing parallel virtual transmission layers in high‐speed networks. In this technique, the AIMD principle of TCP is modified to make more aggressive and efficient probing of the available link bandwidth, which in turn increases the performance. Simulation results show that STCP offers a considerable improvement in performance when compared with other TCP variants such as the conventional TCP protocol and Layered TCP (LTCP)

Reducing Internet Latency : A Survey of Techniques and their Merit

Bob Briscoe, Anna Brunstrom, Andreas Petlund, David Hayes, David Ros, Ing-Jyh Tsang, Stein Gjessing, Gorry Fairhurst, Carsten Griwodz, Michael WelzlPeer reviewedPreprin