Transport Protocols for Large Bandwidth-Delay Product Networks - TCP Extensions and Alternative Transport Protocols

TL;DR

This paper reviews TCP extensions and alternative transport protocols for high-bandwidth, high-delay networks, comparing their performance and highlighting the challenges in evaluating and implementing these solutions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive comparison of TCP extensions and new protocols, emphasizing the lack of standardized evaluation criteria and the difficulty in comparing tailored solutions.

Findings

TCP extensions improve performance but are configuration-specific

New transport protocols can outperform TCP but face compatibility issues

Performance evaluation lacks standardized criteria

Abstract

TCP's poor performance is identified as the bottleneck of high-speed networks. Extensions to TCP have been proposed and implemented. Some authors abandon TCP at all and suggest new transport protocols to overcome TCP limitations, at the expense of compatibility. This paper reports a research on the most significant TCP extensions and transport alternatives, and comparison between them. The majority of the solutions pointed out are difficult to compare because they are tailored to specific configurations. Still there is no specific criteria to evaluate performance metrics and comparison is done on the most evident issues.