TCP in the Internet of Things: from ostracism to prominence

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.TCP has traditionally been neglected as a transport-layer protocol for the Internet of Things (IoT). However, recent trends and industry needs are favoring TCP presence in IoT environments. In this article, we describe the main IoT scenarios where TCP will be used. We then analyze the historically claimed issues of TCP in the IoT context. We argue that, in contrast to generally accepted wisdom, most of those possible issues fall in one of the following categories: i) are also found in well-accepted IoT end-to-end reliability mechanisms, ii) can be solved, or iii) are not actual issues. Considering the future prominent role of TCP in the IoT, we provide recommendations for lightweight TCP implementation and suitable operation in such scenarios, based on our IETF standardization work on the topic.Postprint (author's final draft

A quantitative analysis and performance study of fast congestion notification (FN) mechanism

Congestion in computer network happens when the number of transmission requests exceeds the transmission capacity at a certain network point (called a bottle-neck resource) at a specific time. Congestion usually causes buffers overflow and packets loss. The purpose of congestion management is to maintain a balance between the transmission requests and the transmission capacity so that the bottle-neck resources operate on an optimal level, and the sources are offered service in a way that assures fairness. Fast Congestion Notification (FN) is one of the proactive queue management mechanisms that limits the queuing delay and achieves the maximum link utilization possible with minimum packet drops. In this paper we present a detailed performance comparison of the Linear FN algorithm to RED based on the results obtained through simulations. The paper shows how FN can be tuned for different window size (Ws) and periods of time constant (T) to achieve higher link utilization; reduce the queuing delay, and lower packet drop ratio

System Support for Bandwidth Management and Content Adaptation in Internet Applications

This paper describes the implementation and evaluation of an operating system module, the Congestion Manager (CM), which provides integrated network flow management and exports a convenient programming interface that allows applications to be notified of, and adapt to, changing network conditions. We describe the API by which applications interface with the CM, and the architectural considerations that factored into the design. To evaluate the architecture and API, we describe our implementations of TCP; a streaming layered audio/video application; and an interactive audio application using the CM, and show that they achieve adaptive behavior without incurring much end-system overhead. All flows including TCP benefit from the sharing of congestion information, and applications are able to incorporate new functionality such as congestion control and adaptive behavior.Comment: 14 pages, appeared in OSDI 200

Full TCP/IP for 8-Bit architectures

We describe two small and portable TCP/IP implementations fulfilling the subset of RFC1122 requirements needed for full host-to-host interoperability. Our TCP/IP implementations do not sacrifice any of TCP's mechanisms such as urgent data or congestion control. They support IP fragment reassembly and the number of multiple simultaneous connections is limited only by the available RAM. Despite being small and simple, our implementations do not require their peers to have complex, full-size stacks, but can communicate with peers running a similarly light-weight stack. The code size is on the order of 10 kilobytes and RAM usage can be configured to be as low as a few hundred bytes

IETF standardization in the field of the Internet of Things (IoT): a survey

Smart embedded objects will become an important part of what is called the Internet of Things. However, the integration of embedded devices into the Internet introduces several challenges, since many of the existing Internet technologies and protocols were not designed for this class of devices. In the past few years, there have been many efforts to enable the extension of Internet technologies to constrained devices. Initially, this resulted in proprietary protocols and architectures. Later, the integration of constrained devices into the Internet was embraced by IETF, moving towards standardized IP-based protocols. In this paper, we will briefly review the history of integrating constrained devices into the Internet, followed by an extensive overview of IETF standardization work in the 6LoWPAN, ROLL and CoRE working groups. This is complemented with a broad overview of related research results that illustrate how this work can be extended or used to tackle other problems and with a discussion on open issues and challenges. As such the aim of this paper is twofold: apart from giving readers solid insights in IETF standardization work on the Internet of Things, it also aims to encourage readers to further explore the world of Internet-connected objects, pointing to future research opportunities

A survey of performance enhancement of transmission control protocol (TCP) in wireless ad hoc networks

This Article is provided by the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund - Copyright @ 2011 Springer OpenTransmission control protocol (TCP), which provides reliable end-to-end data delivery, performs well in traditional wired network environments, while in wireless ad hoc networks, it does not perform well. Compared to wired networks, wireless ad hoc networks have some specific characteristics such as node mobility and a shared medium. Owing to these specific characteristics of wireless ad hoc networks, TCP faces particular problems with, for example, route failure, channel contention and high bit error rates. These factors are responsible for the performance degradation of TCP in wireless ad hoc networks. The research community has produced a wide range of proposals to improve the performance of TCP in wireless ad hoc networks. This article presents a survey of these proposals (approaches). A classification of TCP improvement proposals for wireless ad hoc networks is presented, which makes it easy to compare the proposals falling under the same category. Tables which summarize the approaches for quick overview are provided. Possible directions for further improvements in this area are suggested in the conclusions. The aim of the article is to enable the reader to quickly acquire an overview of the state of TCP in wireless ad hoc networks.This study is partly funded by Kohat University of Science & Technology (KUST), Pakistan, and the Higher Education Commission, Pakistan