Reducing the complexities of TCP for a high speed networking environment

Abstract

The authors examine the data transfer phase of TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) to identify complex processing elements, where complexity is measured in terms of instruction counts. The objective is to reduce the complexity and improve the performance of TCP in a high speed networking environment, especially for bulk data transfer. It is found that most of the complexity is due to incomplete state information exchange with the peer, and to adapting to network dynamics using the current congestion control scheme. By partitioning of the protocol functionality into data and control information processing, along with the use of a rate based congestion control scheme, the complexity can be reduced by up to 67%. Performance can be further enhanced by running the new properly partitioned TCP in parallel as well as by simplifying the logic associated with some TCP timers.<>