This paper discusses the performance of the Transmission Control Protocol under two aspects: First, the future Internet will provide some kind of service differentiation and bandwidth guarantees. Nevertheless, TCP connections often cannot fully exploit the reserved bandwidth over time. The congestion control mechanisms like slow start and congestion avoidance have to be revised in the context of guaranteed services, where no congestions occur for special flows. Second, short-lived TCP connections have become more and more important in the Internet. Short-lived connections are needed in transactionoriented network applications and client-server scenarios; a typical example is the common use of the World Wide Web. TCP has typical performance flaws in these cases. Former approaches of improving the performance of TCP did not succeed because their objective was the adaption of all involved TCP stacks. This leads to a change in every TCP stack in the Internet – at least 80 millions hos...
Hartmut Ritter, Klaus Wehrle, Lars C. Wolf