Improving FAST TCP Performance in Asymmetric Networks

FAST TCP is a new promising TCP protocol developed for high-speed long-latency networks. This paper reveals that, within the FAST TCP protocol, the forward flow suffers performance degradation in asymmetric networks with bi-directional flows. We disclose the reason for the performance degradation, i.e., the queue delay measured by forward flow in one-way path is severely influenced by backward flow. A novel method is proposed to ameliorate this situation by using TCP time stamp option. Simulation results demonstrate significant performance improvement of forward flow.