Optimizing TCP Loss Recovery Performance Over Mobile Data Networks

Recent advances in high-speed mobile networks have revealed new bottlenecks in ubiquitous TCP protocol deployed in the Internet. In addition to differentiating non-congestive loss from congestive loss, our experiments revealed two significant performance bottlenecks during the loss recovery phase: flow control bottleneck and application stall, resulting in degradation in QoS performance. To tackle these two problems, we first develop a novel opportunistic retransmission algorithm to eliminate the flow control bottleneck, which enables TCP sender to transmit new packets even if receiver's receiving window is exhausted. Second, application stall can be significantly alleviated by carefully monitoring and tuning the TCP sending buffer growth mechanism. We implemented and modularized the proposed algorithms in the Linux kernel thus they can plug-and-play with the existing TCP loss recovery algorithms easily. We evaluated our proposed algorithms over emulated and real experiments and showed that, compared to existing TCP loss recovery algorithms, the proposed optimization algorithms improve the bandwidth efficiency by up to 133 percent and completely mitigate RTT spikes, i.e., over 50 percent RTT reduction, over the loss recovery phase.