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