RC-UDP: On Raptor Coding over UDP for Reliable High-Bandwidth Data Transport

Data-driven and collaborative research has become the trend for today's scientific communities, resulting in large- scale datasets being shared and transported through networks every day. Most of these large data transfers use TCP sockets which are known to be limited in long-distance and high-bandwidth scenarios. UDP, on the other hand, while fast and efficient does not implement any reliability mechanisms. In this paper, we investigate the use of erasure coding techniques, namely fountain codes, on top of UDP to help high speed and reliable data transfer applications to attain high bandwidth in the face of packet losses. We propose RC-UDP, a Raptor Code over UDP framework that enables reliable data transfers for high bandwidth networks. We implement RC-UDP and evaluate its performance using computer simulation (ns-3) and real world testbed experimentations. We compare RC-UDP to HighSpeed and CUBIC TCP. Our results show that RC-UDP, which achieves up to 75X time reduction while incurring minimum overhead, is beneficial when the network is subject to high congestion or packet drop rates.