Application Layer Routing Options for efficient data transport over the Internet

Most file transfer architectures are based on the conventional client server paradigm with the Internet providing the interconnect infrastructure. In order to avoid/control traffic congestion, the most common scenario is that the server effectively throttles back its transmission when congestion is inferred. In this paper, we propose an alternative mechanism, Application Layer Routing Options (ALRO), to improve the transport of large-size files over the Internet. In our approach, the server will not throttle back its transmission when congestion is inferred, instead, it will reroute the flow of packets along an alternative route. This alternative route is constructed through a "relay router or server", which is a prototype function implemented at a known host dedicated to redirecting the data stream. The proposed mechanism is implemented through a UDP-based application level file transfer protocol and the performance is tested on the Internet through experiments using only one relay server. The underlying file transfer protocol denoted by UFTP already improves latency on the Internet with improvements often on the order of 10 to 20 times over the traditional file transfer protocol FTP. The experimental results presented here show that ALRO combined with UFTP attempts to balance the network load when congestion is inferred while still obtaining high-speed file transferring. The objective of this paper is to investigate ways in which the network and its topology itself can be more efficiently utilized.