Improving throughput and maintaining fairness using parallel TCP

Applications that require good network performance often use parallel TCP streams and TCP modifications to improve the effectiveness of TCP. If the network bottleneck is fully utilized, this approach boosts throughput by unfairly stealing bandwidth from competing TCP streams. Improving the effectiveness of TCP is easy, but improving effectiveness while maintaining fairness is difficult. In this paper, we describe an approach we implemented that uses a long virtual round trip time in combination with parallel TCP streams to improve effectiveness on underutilized networks. Our approach prioritizes fairness at the expense of effectiveness when the network is fully utilized. We compared our approach with standard parallel TCP over a wide-area network, and found that our approach preserves effectiveness and is fairer to competing traffic than standard parallel TCP.

[1]  Tom Kelly,et al.  Scalable TCP: improving performance in highspeed wide area networks , 2003, CCRV.

[2]  V. Jacobson,et al.  Random early detection gateways for congestion avoidance , 1993, TNET.

[3]  Srinivasan Seshan,et al.  An integrated congestion management architecture for Internet hosts , 1999, SIGCOMM '99.

[4]  Craig Partridge,et al.  Packet reordering is not pathological network behavior , 1999, TNET.

[5]  Fernando Paganini,et al.  FAST TCP: from theory to experiments , 2005, IEEE Netw..

[6]  Raj Jain,et al.  Analysis of the Increase and Decrease Algorithms for Congestion Avoidance in Computer Networks , 1989, Comput. Networks.

[7]  Mark Allman,et al.  An Application-Level solution to TCP''s Satellite Inefficiencies , 1996 .

[8]  Min Sik Kim,et al.  Transient behaviors of TCP-friendly congestion control protocols , 2003, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2001. Conference on Computer Communications. Twentieth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Society (Cat. No.01CH37213).

[9]  Brian D. Noble,et al.  The Effects of Systemic Packet Loss on Aggregate TCP Flows , 2002, ACM/IEEE SC 2002 Conference (SC'02).

[10]  Ian T. Foster,et al.  Data management and transfer in high-performance computational grid environments , 2002, Parallel Comput..

[11]  Ratul Mahajan,et al.  Understanding BGP misconfiguration , 2002, SIGCOMM 2002.

[12]  M. Ilyas.  Congestion avoidance in computer networks , 1985 .

[13]  Kyoung Shin Park,et al.  CAVERNsoft G2: a toolkit for high performance tele-immersive collaboration , 2000, VRST '00.

[14]  R. Hughes-Jones.  Performance Measurements on Gigabit Ethernet NICs and Server Quality Motherboards , 2003 .

[15]  Paul Gray,et al.  Performance evaluation of copper-based Gigabit Ethernet interfaces , 2002, 27th Annual IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks, 2002. Proceedings. LCN 2002..

[16]  Robert L. Grossman,et al.  PSockets: The Case for Application-level Network Striping for Data Intensive Applications using High Speed Wide Area Networks , 2000, ACM/IEEE SC 2000 Conference (SC'00).

[17]  Deepak Bansal,et al.  Binomial congestion control algorithms , 2001, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2001. Conference on Computer Communications. Twentieth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Society (Cat. No.01CH37213).

[18]  Jason Lee,et al.  Distributed parallel data storage systems: a scalable approach to high speed image servers , 1994, MULTIMEDIA '94.

[19]  Charles Hornig.  A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams over Ethernet Networks , 1984, RFC.

[20]  Christophe Diot,et al.  Detection and analysis of routing loops in packet traces , 2002, IMW '02.

[21]  S. Floyd,et al.  On inferring TCP behavior , 2001, SIGCOMM '01.

[22]  Brian D. Noble,et al.  The end-to-end performance effects of parallel TCP sockets on a lossy wide-area network , 2002, Proceedings 16th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium.

[23]  Sally Floyd,et al.  On inferring TCP behavior , 2001, SIGCOMM 2001.

[24]  Donald F. Towsley,et al.  Modeling TCP Reno performance: a simple model and its empirical validation , 2000, TNET.

[25]  Sven Ubik.  Debugging end-to-end performance in commodity operating systems , 2003 .

[26]  Steven McCanne,et al.  On improving the fairness of TCP congestion avoidance , 1998, IEEE GLOBECOM 1998 (Cat. NO. 98CH36250).

[27]  T. V. Lakshman,et al.  The performance of TCP/IP for networks with high bandwidth-delay products and random loss , 1997, TNET.

[28]  Nitin H. Vaidya,et al.  Is the round-trip time correlated with the number of packets in flight? , 2003, IMC '03.

[29]  Craig Partridge,et al.  When the CRC and TCP checksum disagree , 2000, SIGCOMM.

[30]  Donald F. Towsley,et al.  Modeling TCP throughput: a simple model and its empirical validation , 1998, SIGCOMM '98.

[31]  QUTdN QeO,et al.  Random early detection gateways for congestion avoidance , 1993, TNET.

[32]  Matthew Mathis,et al.  The macroscopic behavior of the TCP congestion avoidance algorithm , 1997, CCRV.

[33]  L Cottrell.  Internet Performance to Africa , 2003 .