RBA: Adaptive TCP Receive Buffer Sizing

With the rapid growth of hardware devices, a single host may have simultaneous connections that vary in network bandwidth and CPU processing capability as several orders of magnitude. State-of-art flow control mechanism, i.e., TCP auto-tuning, still needs to configure the maximum receive buffer, which cannot be applied to all connections in one host. In this paper, we reveal that improper receive buffer restrained by this configuration either (i) underutilizes the available network and CPU resources or (ii) occupies too much memory and then causes overall throughput collapse. To fully utilize resources with less memory occupancy, we present Receive Buffer Adaptive-regulating (RBA) algorithm, which regulates receive buffer according to the estimation of network bandwidth and receiver's processing capability. Testbed experiments show that RBA adapts to different scenarios and brings substantial performance improvement compared to TCP auto-tuning.