The case for informed transport protocols

Wide-area distributed applications are frequently limited by the performance of Internet data transfers. We argue that the principle cause of this effect is the poor interaction between host-centric congestion control algorithms and the realities of today's Internet traffic and infrastructure. In particular when the duration of a network flow is short, then using end-to-end feedback to determine network conditions will be extremely inefficient. We propose an incremental approach to the problem, in which congestion information is shared among many co-located hosts and transport protocols make informed congestion control decisions. We argue that the resulting system can potentially improve the performance experienced by each network user as well as the overall efficiency of the network.