NF-TCP: Network Friendly TCP

Delay-insensitive applications such as P2P file sharing, data center backups and software updates generate substantial amounts of traffic. This traffic, transported potentially over multiple TCP connections, competes with traffic from other possibly interactive applications. Today, with TCP, they compete on an equal level for each individual connection. In this paper, we propose a new TCP variant for such delay-insensitive applications, which we call Network Friendly TCP (NF-TCP). NF-TCP is responsive to available bandwidth, seeking to quickly and efficiently utilize the same in a congestion-free situation, while backing-off more aggressively than standard TCP on encountering competing traffic in a congested network. NF-TCP uses a novel combination of utilizing measurement of available bandwidth and ECN-based congestion avoidance techniques to ensure that it is truly friendly to existing TCP connections. We evaluate the performance of NF-TCP through ns-2 simulations and present the initial results enlightening the friendly nature of NF-TCP compared to standard TCP.