TCP performance improvement over high-speed flow switching networks

Future broadband networks may provide very high bandwidth on demand for certain applications e.g. downloading of a gigabyte file to a high-performance workstation. Motivated by such applications, we study the performance of TCP under the scenario where there is long network latency and rapidly changing bandwidth. We show that existing TCP cannot utilize the bandwidth effectively under such network dynamics. We propose a modification of TCP that would separate the flow control from the loss recovery mechanisms, allowing the efficient use of the available bandwidth over a network that has a high bandwidth-delay product and in which the bandwidth can vary by orders of magnitude over a short period of time. We present simulation results demonstrating the significant performance gain of our new approach.