TCP Boston: a fragmentation-tolerant TCP protocol for ATM networks

We propose a new transport protocol, TCP Boston, that turns the ATM's 53-byte cell-oriented switching architecture into an advantage for TCP/IP. At the core of TCP Boston is the adaptive information dispersal algorithm (AIDA), an efficient encoding technique that allows for dynamic redundancy control. AIDA makes the TCP/IP's performance less sensitive to cell losses, thus ensuring a graceful degradation of the TCP/IP's performance when faced with congested resources. We introduce AIDA and overview the main features of TCP Boston. We present detailed simulation results that show the superiority of our protocol when compared to other adaptations of TCP/IP over ATMs.