A Survey on Recent Advances in Transport Layer Protocols

TL;DR

This survey reviews recent advances in transport layer protocols, highlighting innovations in congestion control, new protocol designs, and multi-path capabilities to enhance performance in modern networks.

Contribution

It systematically categorizes recent research trends, providing a comprehensive overview of novel transport protocols and techniques developed for current and future networks.

Findings

Emergence of machine learning-based congestion control algorithms

Development of user-space transport protocols alternative to TCP

Introduction of multi-path transport layer capabilities

Abstract

Over the years, the Internet has been enriched with new available communication technologies, for both fixed and mobile networks and devices, exhibiting an impressive growth in terms of performance, with steadily increasing available data rates. The Internet research community has kept trying to evolve the transport layer protocols to match the capabilities of modern networks, in order to fully reap the benefits of the new communication technologies. This paper surveys the main novelties related to transport protocols that have been recently proposed, identifying three main research trends: (i) the evolution of congestion control algorithms, to target optimal performance in challenging scenarios, possibly with the application of machine learning techniques; (ii) the proposal of brand new transport protocols, alternative to TCP and implemented in the user-space; and (iii) the introduction of multi-path capabilities at the transport layer.