Yi-Cheng Chan

An enhanced congestion avoidance mechanism for TCP Vegas

TCP Vegas detects network congestion in the early stage and successfully prevents periodic packet loss that usually occurs in traditional schemes. It has been demonstrated that TCP Vegas achieves much higher throughput than TCP Reno. However, TCP Vegas cannot prevent unnecessary throughput degradation when congestion occurs in the backward path. In this letter, we propose an enhanced congestion avoidance mechanism for TCP Vegas. By distinguishing whether congestion occurs in the forward path or not, it significantly improves the connection throughput when the backward path is congested.

Fast retransmit and fast recovery schemes of transport protocols: A survey and taxonomy

Although there are two standard transport protocols, TCP and UDP, offering services in the Internet, the majority of the traffic over the Internet is TCP-based. TCP-based applications can react to packet losses; however, many performance problems have been recently observed in the Internet. To resolve these problems, several new TCP fast retransmit and fast recovery algorithms have been proposed. This article surveys state-of-the-art fast retransmit and fast recovery mechanisms of TCP to address the lost packet problem, and presents a description of some useful algorithms, design issues, advantages, and disadvantages. The objective of this article is fourfold: to provide an introduction to TCP protocol; to discuss problems degrading TCP retransmission performance in the present-day Internet; to describe some proposed transport protocols that solve a number of throughput issues; and finally, to gain new insight into these protocols and thereby suggest avenues for future research. Based on our taxonomy, existing fast retransmit and fast recovery schemes of transport protocols are described in this survey.

Performance improvement of congestion avoidance mechanism for TCP Vegas

In this paper, we propose a router-based congestion avoidance mechanism (RoVegas) for TCP Vegas. TCP Vegas detects network congestion in the early stage and successfully prevents periodic packet loss that usually occurs in TCP Reno. It has been demonstrated that TCP Vegas outperforms TCP Reno in many aspects. However, TCP Vegas suffers several problems that inhere in its congestion avoidance mechanism, these include issues of rerouting, persistent congestion, fairness, and network asymmetry. By performing the proposed scheme in routers along the round-trip path, RoVegas can solve the problems of rerouting and persistent congestion, enhance the fairness among the competitive connections, and improve the throughput when congestion occurs on the backward path. Through the results of both analysis and simulation, we demonstrate the effectiveness of RoVegas.

CODE TCP: A competitive delay-based TCP

TCP Vegas is a well-known delay-based congestion control mechanism. Studies have indicated that TCP Vegas outperforms TCP Reno in many aspects. However, Reno currently remains the most widely deployed TCP variant in the Internet. This is mainly because of the incompatibility of Vegas with Reno. The performance of Vegas is generally mediocre in environments where it coexists with Reno. Hence, there exists no incentive for operating systems to adopt Vegas as the default transport layer protocol. In this study, we propose a new variant of Vegas called COmpetitive DElay-based TCP (CODE TCP). This variant is compatible with Reno and it can obtain a fair share of network resources. CODE is a sender-sided modification and hence it can be implemented solely at the end host. Simulations and experiments confirm that CODE has better fairness characteristics in network environments in which it coexists with Reno while retaining the good features of Vegas.

WARD: a transmission control protocol-friendly stateless active queue management scheme

In this article, the problem of providing a fair bandwidth allocation to the flows sharing a congested link in a router is investigated. Queue management, bandwidth share and congestion control are very important to both the robustness and fairness of the Internet. The buffer at the outgoing link is a simple FIFO, shared by packets belonging to the flows. A new transmission control protocol (TCP)-friendly router-based active queue management scheme, termed WARD, is proposed to approximate the fair queueing policy. WARD is a simple packet-dropping algorithm with a random mechanism which discriminates against flows that submit more packets per second than is allowed as their fair share. By doing this, it not only protects TCP connections from user datagram protocol flows, but also solves the problem of competing bandwidth among different TCP versions, such as TCP Vegas and TCP Reno. In addition, WARD works quite well for TCP flow isolation even with different round trip times. In other words, WARD improves the unfair bandwidth allocation properties. Furthermore, as it is stateless and easy to implement, WARD controls unresponsive or misbehaving flows with only a minimum overhead.

An enhanced slow-start mechanism for TCP Vegas

In this article, we present a new slow-start variant, which improves the throughput of transmission control protocol (TCP) Vegas. We call this new mechanism Gallop-Vegas because it quickly ramps up to the available bandwidth and reduces the burstiness during the slow-start phase. TCP is known to send bursts of packets during its slow-start phase due to the fast window increase and the ACK-clock based transmission. This phenomenon causes TCP Vegas to change from slow-start phase to congestion-avoidance phase too early in the large bandwidth-delay product (BDP) links. Therefore, in Gallop-Vegas, we increase the congestion window size with a rate between exponential growth and linear growth during slow-start phase. Our analysis, simulation results, and measurements on the Internet show that Gallop-Vegas significantly improves the performance of a connection, especially during the slow-start phase. Furthermore, it is implementation feasible because only sending part needs to be modified.

RoVegas: a router-based congestion avoidance mechanism for TCP Vegas

Transmission control protocol (TCP) Vegas detects network congestion in the early stage and successfully prevents periodic packet loss that usually occurs in TCP Reno. It has been demonstrated that TCP Vegas outperforms TCP Reno in many aspects. However, TCP Vegas suffers several problems that inhere in its congestion avoidance mechanism, these include issues of rerouting, persistent congestion, fairness, and network asymmetry. In this paper, we propose a router-based congestion avoidance mechanism (RoVegas) for TCP Vegas. By performing the proposed scheme in routers along the round-trip path, RoVegas can solve the problems of rerouting and persistent congestion, enhance the fairness among the competitive connections, and improve the throughput when congestion occurs on the backward path. Through the results of both analysis and simulation, we demonstrate the effectiveness of RoVegas.

An aided congestion avoidance mechanism for TCP vegas

TCP Vegas detects network congestion in the early stage and successfully prevents periodic packet loss that usually occurs in TCP Reno. It has been demonstrated that TCP Vegas achieves much higher performance than TCP Reno in many aspects. However, TCP Vegas cannot prevent unnecessary throughput degradation when congestion occurs in the backward path, it passes through multiple congested links, or it reroutes through a path with longer round-trip time (RTT). In this paper, we propose an aided congestion avoidance mechanism for TCP Vegas, called Aid-Vegas, which uses the relative one-way delay of each packet along the forward path to distinguish whether congestion occurs or not. Through the results of simulation, we demonstrate that Aid-Vegas can solve the problems of rerouting and backward congestion, enhance the fairness among the competitive connections, and improve the throughput when multiple congested links are encountered.

An efficient mechanism of TCP-Vegas on mobile IP networks

Mobile IP network provides hosts the connectivity to the Internet while changing locations. However, when using TCP Vegas over a mobile network, it may respond to a handoff by invoking a congestion control algorithm, thereby resulting in performance degradation, because TCP Vegas is sensitive to the change of RTT (round-trip time) and it may recognize the increased RTT as a result of network congestion. Since TCP Vegas could not differentiate whether the increased RTT is due to route change or network congestion. This work investigates how to improve the performance of Vegas after a mobile IP handoff and proposes a variation of TCP Vegas, so-called Demo-Vegas, which is able to detect the movement of two end-hosts of a connection, and re-measure the base RTT (minimum round-trip time) if necessary. The proposed mechanism maintains end-to-end semantics, and operates under the existing network infrastructure. Demo-Vegas presents a simple modification in the two end sides of a connection and uses one reserved bit in TCP header. Simulation results demonstrate that Demo-Vegas features higher performance than Vegas in mobile IP networks.

TCP-Ho: A Congestion Control Algorithm with Design and Performance Evaluation

A critical design issue of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is its congestion control that allows the protocol to adjust the end-to-end communication rate based on the detection of packet loss. However, TCP congestion control may function poorly during its slow start and congestion avoidance phases. This is because TCP sends bursts of packets with the fast window increase and the ACK-clock based transmission in slow start, and respond slowly with large congestion windows especially in high bandwidth-delay product (BDP) networks during congestion avoidance. In this article, we propose an improved version of TCP, TCP-Ho, that uses an efficient congestion window control algorithm for a TCP source. According to the estimated available bandwidth and measured round-trip times (RTTs), the proposed algorithm adjusts the congestion window size with a rate between exponential growth and linear growth intelligently. Our extensive simulation results show that TCP-Ho significantly improves the performance of connections as well as remaining fair and stable when the BDP increases. Furthermore, it is feasible to implement because only sending part needs to be modified.