Christina Parsa J.J. Garcia-Luna-Aceves
Computer Engineering Department
Baskin School of Engineering
University of California
Santa Cruz, California 95064
chris, jj@cse.ucsc.edu
January 25, 2000
We present a new implementation of TCP that is better suited to today's Internet than TCP Reno or Tahoe. Our implementation of TCP, which we call TCP Santa Cruz (SC), is designed to work with path asymmetries, networks with lossy links and out-of-order packet delivery, and networks with limited bandwidth and dynamic changes in delay. The new congestion-control and error-recovery mechanisms in TCP-SC are based on: using estimates of delay along the forward path, rather than the round-trip delay; reaching a target operating point for the number of packets in the bottleneck of the connection, without congesting the network; and making resilient use of any acknowledgments received over a window, rather than increasing the congestion window by counting the number of returned ACKs. We compare TCP-SC with the Reno and Vegas implementations using the ns2 simulator. The simulation experiments show that TCP-SC achieves significantly higher throughput, smaller delays, and smaller delay variances than Reno and Vegas. TCP-SC is also shown to prevent the swings in the size of the congestion window that typify TCP Reno and Tahoe traffic, and to determine the direction of congestion in the network and isolate the forward throughput from events on the reverse path.