Connection Management in a Resilient Transport Protocol

With the motivation to develop a resilient and survivable Future Internet, we are constructing a configurable and adaptive multipath transport-layer protocol called ResTP. While some other composite protocols mainly emphasize their flexibility to provide services to multiple application classes operating on top of various network environments, our ResTP focuses on increasing the resilience level of the protocol in particular and the network in which ResTP is deployed in general, by following a set of design guidelines derived from the ResiliNets framework. In this framework, resilience has a broad definition that subsumes multiple disciplines, including survivability, disruption tolerance, and dependability. The implementation of ResTP employs modular programming to decrease the complexity while increasing its extensibility. ResTP uses a tunable header to minimize unnecessary overhead. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of ResTP connection management, including its connection establishment, monitoring, and termination. Through simulations in ns-3, we show that ResTP achieves a comparable performance to UDP in its connectionless mode with its ability to optimize the header. We also compare ResTP opportunistic and TCP handshake schemes and show that the opportunistic outperforms the 3-way handshake, especially in the presence of long delay and SYN drop. When using the same connection management scheme as TCP with ARQ for error control and bulk-send application, ResTP outperforms TCP, especially in the presence of random loss.