First International Workshop
on Protocols for Fast
Long-Distance Networks

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Plenary Talk

Sally Floyd, ICIR, USA

Title: HighSpeed TCP and Quick-Start for Fast Long-Distance Networks

Abstract:

The congestion control mechanisms of the current Standard TCP constrains the congestion windows that can be achieved by TCP in realistic environments. For example, for a Standard TCP connection with 1500-byte packets and a 100 ms round-trip time, achieving a steady-state throughput of 10 Gbit/s would require an average congestion window of 83,333 segments, and a packet drop rate of at most one congestion event every 5,000,000,000 packet (or equivalently, at most one congestion event every 1 2/3 hours). This is widely acknowledged as an unrealistic constraint. To address this limitation of TCP, we have proposed HighSpeed TCP, a modification to TCP's congestion control mechanism for use with TCP connections with large congestion windows. This talk is a report on HighSpeed TCP, an outline of open issues, and a request for further exploration. 

We have also proposed Quick-Start for TCP and IP, to enable protocols to determine an optional allowed initial congestion window or initial sending rate at the start of a data transfer. Quick-Start is designed to allow TCP connections or other transport protocols to use high initial windows in circumstances when there is significant unused bandwidth along the path.