Fast kernel: Background theory and experimental results

A breakthrough that has allowed the Internet to expand by five orders of magnitude in size and in backbone speed in the last 15 years was the invention in 1988 by Jacobson of an end-to-end congestion control algorithm in TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) [1]. The algorithm is a distributed and asynchronous method to share network resources among competing users. TCP has been carrying more than 90% of the Internet traffic and Jacobson’s algorithm is instrumental in preventing the Internet from congestion collapse while the Web exploded in the 1990s. This algorithm, designed when most parts of the Internet could barely carry the traffic of a single uncompressed voice call, however, cannot scale to the future ultrascale networks that must be able to carry the traffic of 1.5 million concurrent voice calls. This is due to serious equilibrium and stability problems in high capacity long distance networks, and has led to doubts on whether the current TCP paradigm of end-to-end control coupled with packet switching is suitable for future networks. In this talk, we describe a new TCP congestion control method that can stably achieve high utilization and throughput at multi-Gbps over long distance.

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