A User Level, Reliable, and Reconfigurable Transport Layer Protocol

It is well known that TCP is not suitable for a number of environments such as wireless, satellite, and long-fat-pipe networks. At the same time, there is no other single transport protocol that would outperform TCP in all situations. In this paper, we explore an alternative transport layer protocol that is more suitable for today’s mobile as well as other non-conventional network environments. The result is a user-level, reconfigurable, TCP-friendly (asymptotically converges to fairness as in the case of LIMD (Linear Increase Multiplicative Decrease) algorithms) transport layer protocol, called RRTP (Reliable and Reconfigurable Transport Protocol), which runs atop of UDP. We evaluate our protocol using the standard network simulation tool (ns2). Several representative network configurations are used to benchmark the performance of our protocol against TCP in terms of network throughput and congestion loss rate. It is observed that under normal operating conditions, our protocol has a performance advantage of 30% to 700% over TCP in lossy, wireless environments as well as high bandwidth, high latency networks.

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