11,932 research outputs found
TCP smart framing: a segmentation algorithm to reduce TCP latency
TCP Smart Framing, or TCP-SF for short, enables the Fast Retransmit/Recovery algorithms even when the congestion window is small. Without modifying the TCP congestion control based on the additive-increase/multiplicative-decrease paradigm, TCP-SF adopts a novel segmentation algorithm: while Classic TCP always tries to send full-sized segments, a TCP-SF source adopts a more flexible segmentation algorithm to try and always have a number of in-flight segments larger than 3 so as to enable Fast Recovery. We motivate this choice by real traffic measurements, which indicate that today's traffic is populated by short-lived flows, whose only means to recover from a packet loss is by triggering a Retransmission Timeout. The key idea of TCP-SF can be implemented on top of any TCP flavor, from Tahoe to SACK, and requires modifications to the server TCP stack only, and can be easily coupled with recent TCP enhancements. The performance of the proposed TCP modification were studied by means of simulations, live measurements and an analytical model. In addition, the analytical model we have devised has a general scope, making it a valid tool for TCP performance evaluation in the small window region. Improvements are remarkable under several buffer management schemes, and maximized by byte-oriented schemes
Validation of simulated real world TCP stacks
The TCP models in ns-2 have been validated and are widely used in network research. They are however not aimed at producing results consistent with a TCP implementation, they are rather designed to be a general model for TCP congestion control. The Network Simulation Cradle makes real world TCP implementations available to ns-2: Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD can all be simulated as easily as using the original simplified models. These simulated TCP implementations can be validated by directly comparing packet traces from simulations to traces measured from a real network. We describe the Network Simulation Cradle, present packet trace comparison results showing the high degree of accuracy possible when simulating with real TCP implementations and briefly show how this is reflected in a simulation study of TCP throughput
FavorQueue: A parameterless active queue management to improve TCP traffic performance
This paper presents and analyzes the implementation of a novel active queue management (AQM) named FavorQueue that aims to improve delay transfer of short lived TCP flows over best-effort networks. The idea is to dequeue packets that do not belong to a flow previously enqueued first. The rationale is to mitigate the delay induced by long-lived TCP flows over the pace of short TCP data requests and to prevent dropped packets at the beginning of a connection and during recovery period. Although the main target of this AQM is to accelerate short TCP traffic, we show that FavorQueue does not only improve the performance of short TCP traffic but also improves the performance of all TCP traffic in terms of drop ratio and latency whatever the flow size. In particular, we demonstrate that FavorQueue reduces the loss of a retransmitted packet, decreases the number of dropped packets recovered by RTO and improves the latency up to 30% compared to DropTail. Finally, we show that this scheme remains compliant with recent TCP updates such as the increase of the initial slow-start value
Analysis of Multiple Flows using Different High Speed TCP protocols on a General Network
We develop analytical tools for performance analysis of multiple TCP flows
(which could be using TCP CUBIC, TCP Compound, TCP New Reno) passing through a
multi-hop network. We first compute average window size for a single TCP
connection (using CUBIC or Compound TCP) under random losses. We then consider
two techniques to compute steady state throughput for different TCP flows in a
multi-hop network. In the first technique, we approximate the queues as M/G/1
queues. In the second technique, we use an optimization program whose solution
approximates the steady state throughput of the different flows. Our results
match well with ns2 simulations.Comment: Submitted to Performance Evaluatio
Adaptive delayed channel access for IEEE 802.11n WLANs
Abstract— In this paper we investigate potential benefits that an adaptive delayed channel access algorithm can attain for the next-generation wireless LANs, the IEEE 802.11n. We show that the performance of frame aggregation introduced by the 802.11n adheres due to the priority mechanism of the legacy 802.11e EDCA scheduler, resulting in a poor overall performance. Because high priority flows have low channel utilization, the low priority flows throughputs can be amerced further. By introducing an additional delay at the MAC layer, before the channel access scheduling, it will retain aggregate sizes at higher numbers and consequently a better channel utilization. Also, in order to support both UDP and TCP transport layer protocols, the algorithm’s operational conditions are kept adaptive. The simulation results demonstrate that our proposed adaptive delayed channel access outperforms significantly the current 802.11n specification and non-adaptive delayed channel access
Will TCP work in mmWave 5G Cellular Networks?
The vast available spectrum in the millimeter wave (mmWave) bands offers the
possibility of multi-Gbps data rates for fifth generation (5G) cellular
networks. However, mmWave capacity can be highly intermittent due to the
vulnerability of mmWave signals to blockages and delays in directional
searching. Such highly variable links present unique challenges for adaptive
control mechanisms in transport layer protocols and end-to-end applications.
This paper considers the fundamental question of whether TCP - the most widely
used transport protocol - will work in mmWave cellular systems. The paper
provides a comprehensive simulation study of TCP considering various factors
such as the congestion control algorithm, including the recently proposed TCP
BBR, edge vs. remote servers, handover and multi- connectivity, TCP packet size
and 3GPP-stack parameters. We show that the performance of TCP on mmWave links
is highly dependent on different combinations of these parameters, and identify
the open challenges in this area.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables. To be published in the IEEE
Communication Magazin
SSthreshless Start: A Sender-Side TCP Intelligence for Long Fat Network
Measurement shows that 85% of TCP flows in the internet are short-lived flows
that stay most of their operation in the TCP startup phase. However, many
previous studies indicate that the traditional TCP Slow Start algorithm does
not perform well, especially in long fat networks. Two obvious problems are
known to impact the Slow Start performance, which are the blind initial setting
of the Slow Start threshold and the aggressive increase of the probing rate
during the startup phase regardless of the buffer sizes along the path. Current
efforts focusing on tuning the Slow Start threshold and/or probing rate during
the startup phase have not been considered very effective, which has prompted
an investigation with a different approach. In this paper, we present a novel
TCP startup method, called threshold-less slow start or SSthreshless Start,
which does not need the Slow Start threshold to operate. Instead, SSthreshless
Start uses the backlog status at bottleneck buffer to adaptively adjust probing
rate which allows better seizing of the available bandwidth. Comparing to the
traditional and other major modified startup methods, our simulation results
show that SSthreshless Start achieves significant performance improvement
during the startup phase. Moreover, SSthreshless Start scales well with a wide
range of buffer size, propagation delay and network bandwidth. Besides, it
shows excellent friendliness when operating simultaneously with the currently
popular TCP NewReno connections.Comment: 25 pages, 10 figures, 7 table
RepFlow: Minimizing Flow Completion Times with Replicated Flows in Data Centers
Short TCP flows that are critical for many interactive applications in data
centers are plagued by large flows and head-of-line blocking in switches.
Hash-based load balancing schemes such as ECMP aggravate the matter and result
in long-tailed flow completion times (FCT). Previous work on reducing FCT
usually requires custom switch hardware and/or protocol changes. We propose
RepFlow, a simple yet practically effective approach that replicates each short
flow to reduce the completion times, without any change to switches or host
kernels. With ECMP the original and replicated flows traverse distinct paths
with different congestion levels, thereby reducing the probability of having
long queueing delay. We develop a simple analytical model to demonstrate the
potential improvement of RepFlow. Extensive NS-3 simulations and Mininet
implementation show that RepFlow provides 50%--70% speedup in both mean and
99-th percentile FCT for all loads, and offers near-optimal FCT when used with
DCTCP.Comment: To appear in IEEE INFOCOM 201
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