Gallop-Vegas: An enhanced slow-start mechanism for TCP Vegas

In this article, we present a new slow-start variant, which improves the throughput of transmission control protocol (TCP) Vegas. We call this new mechanism Gallop-Vegas because it quickly ramps up to the available bandwidth and reduces the burstiness during the slow-start phase. TCP is known to send bursts of packets during its slow-start phase due to the fast window increase and the ACK-clock based transmission. This phenomenon causes TCP Vegas to change from slow-start phase to congestion-avoidance phase too early in the large bandwidth-delay product (BDP) links. Therefore, in Gallop-Vegas, we increase the congestion window size with a rate between exponential growth and linear growth during slow-start phase. Our analysis, simulation results, and measurements on the Internet show that Gallop-Vegas significantly improves the performance of a connection, especially during the slow-start phase. Furthermore, it is implementation feasible because only sending part needs to be modified.