Improving FAST TCP Performance in Asymmetric Networks

FAST TCP is a new promising TCP protocol developed for high-speed long-latency networks. This paper reveals that, within the FAST TCP protocol, the forward flow suffers performance degradation in asymmetric networks with bi-directional flows. We disclose the reason for the performance degradation, i.e., the queue delay measured by forward flow in one-way path is severely influenced by backward flow. A novel method is proposed to ameliorate this situation by using TCP time stamp option. Simulation results demonstrate significant performance improvement of forward flow.

[1]  Cheng Jin,et al.  FAST TCP: Motivation, Architecture, Algorithms, Performance , 2006, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

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

[3]  Moshe Zukerman,et al.  FAST TCP: fairness and queuing issues , 2005, IEEE Communications Letters.

[4]  Wei Zhang,et al.  Stability of TCP/RED systems in AQM routers , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

[5]  Cheng Jin.  FAST TCP for High-Speed Long-Distance Networks , 2003 .

[6]  Randy H. Katz,et al.  The effects of asymmetry on TCP performance , 1999, Mob. Networks Appl..

[7]  Soung Chang Liew,et al.  A remedy for performance degradation of TCP Vegas in asymmetric networks , 2003, IEEE Communications Letters.

[8]  V. Jacobson,et al.  Congestion avoidance and control , 1988, CCRV.

[9]  Moshe Zukerman,et al.  Fairness comparison of FAST TCP and TCP Reno , 2007, Comput. Commun..

[10]  T. V. Lakshman,et al.  TCP/IP performance with random loss and bidirectional congestion , 2000, TNET.