A new scheme for TCP congestion control: smooth-start and dynamic recovery

This paper presents a new approach to TCP congestion control. The new scheme includes two parts: (I) the smooth-start algorithm, which replaces the slow-start algorithm at the start of a TCP connection or after a retransmission timeout, and (2) the dynamic recovery algorithm, which replaces the fast recovery algorithm to recover packet losses when a TCP connection is congested. Both algorithms require modifications only to the sender side of the TCP implementation. Simulation is used to evaluate the performance of the algorithms. The simulation experiments are conducted using the ns simulator to facilitate comparisons with Tahoe, Reno, New-Reno, SACK, and FACK TCP. The simulation results show that the new scheme performs at least as well as SACK and FACK TCP, which in turn consistently outperform TCP Tahoe and Reno. Furthermore, the implementation of the new scheme is simpler than that of SACK and FACK.

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