Protocols for Transferring Bulk Data Over Internet: Current Solutions and Future Challenges

Big Data has gained interests in effectively capturing, storing, analysis and visualisation from wide range of scientific, economic and business communities and is frequently communicated over internet for various purposes among government and enterprise sectors sited at different locations. Several experiments and analyses have shown that currently employed applications and transport protocols in internet are not suitable for transferring such voluminous data because of not addressing requirements of low-access latency. This paper presents issues associated with the basic mechanism of legacy protocols in the context of high speed networks for transferring Big Data e.g. conservative TCP congestion control mechanism may result in minute utilisation of high bandwidth provisioning networks. We present state-of-art alternatives proposed in the literature to solve these problems in high speed networks. We compare several underlying emerging alternatives of TCP, UDP and multi-TCP-streams protocols over a number of comparison criteria e.g. protocol convergence, responsiveness etc., to handle communication of huge data. We note that these protocol alternatives have significant importance over fulfilling requirements of emerging data-intensive applications in high-speed networks. In addition, we discuss open research issues and challenges that can be explored as a source of motivation towards development and deployment of data-intensive applications in emerging networking technologies.