TCP-Africa: an adaptive and fair rapid increase rule for scalable TCP

High capacity data transfers over the Internet routinely fail to meet end-to-end performance expectations. The default transport control protocol for best effort data traffic is currently TCP, which does not scale well to 100 Mbps and higher networks over long distances. In congestion avoidance, TCP is not swift enough to fully utilize resources over paths with a high delay bandwidth product. First attempts to alleviate this problem by equipping TCP with increased aggressiveness have shown the disadvantage of poor fairness with the ubiquitous standard TCP-Reno, or in some cases, even among two connections running over the same path. We propose a new delay sensitive-congestion avoidance mode (TCP-Africa) that allows for scalable, aggressive behavior in large underutilized links, yet falls back to the more conservative TCP-Reno algorithm once links become well utilized and congestion is imminent. Through ns2 simulations we argue for the safety, efficiency, and fairness of TCP-Africa.