SSthreshless Start: A Sender-Side TCP Intelligence for Long Fat Network
Xiao Lu, Ke Zhang, Chuan Heng Foh, and Cheng Peng Fu

TL;DR
This paper introduces SSthreshless Start, a novel TCP startup method that adaptively adjusts probing rate based on buffer backlog, eliminating the need for a fixed Slow Start threshold, and improves performance in long fat networks.
Contribution
The paper proposes a threshold-less TCP startup algorithm that dynamically adjusts probing rate using buffer backlog, outperforming traditional methods in various network conditions.
Findings
Significant performance improvements during startup phase.
Scales well with different buffer sizes, delays, and bandwidths.
Maintains friendliness with TCP NewReno.
Abstract
Measurement shows that 85% of TCP flows in the internet are short-lived flows that stay most of their operation in the TCP startup phase. However, many previous studies indicate that the traditional TCP Slow Start algorithm does not perform well, especially in long fat networks. Two obvious problems are known to impact the Slow Start performance, which are the blind initial setting of the Slow Start threshold and the aggressive increase of the probing rate during the startup phase regardless of the buffer sizes along the path. Current efforts focusing on tuning the Slow Start threshold and/or probing rate during the startup phase have not been considered very effective, which has prompted an investigation with a different approach. In this paper, we present a novel TCP startup method, called threshold-less slow start or SSthreshless Start, which does not need the Slow Start threshold to…
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Taxonomy
TopicsNetwork Traffic and Congestion Control · Interconnection Networks and Systems · Advanced Optical Network Technologies
