An early bandwidth notification (EBN) architecture for dynamic bandwidth environment

In today's heterogeneous Internet, bandwidth available to TCP flows is often variable. However, current TCP cannot perform optimally under such dynamically varying bandwidth conditions. This paper addresses this problem by introducing a new architecture to improve TCP performance with explicit bandwidth notification (EBN). It uses a normalized bandwidth feedback method to provide accurate and timely bandwidth estimations. Then, a new TCP control algorithm (TCP-EBN) is proposed to give a prompt response to any bandwidth changes. Our simulation results have shown that TCP-EBN performs much better than several other variations of TCP.