Implementation Experiments of the TCP Proxy Mechanism

Interest in the TCP overlay network, which controls the data transmission quality at the transport layer, has grown as the user demand for sophisticated and diversified services in the Internet has increased. In the TCP overlay network, TCP proxy is a fundamental mechanism that transparently splits a TCP connection between sender and receiver hosts into multiple TCP connection at some nodes in the network and relays data packets from the sender host to the receiver host via the split TCP connec tions. In the present paper, we investigate the performance of the TCP proxy mechanism through experiments using the actual public network. The TCP proxy mechanism is shown to enhance the data transfer throughput without any change in the TCP/IP protocol stack of the endhost. In addition, we evaluate the performance of gentle High-Speed TCP, as proposed in a previous study, on the TCP connection between the TCP proxy nodes.