A Sustainable Solution to Support Data Security in High Bandwidth Healthcare Remote Locations by Using TCP CUBIC Mechanism

Abstract

Long distance high bandwidth networks are spanning several continents and many remote Healthcare centers are centralizing their data centers for economic reasons. For the best performance of their data centers, TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) performance and data security are the main critical issues in these network scenarios. TCP performance is directly related to its congestion control mechanism which is responsible for detecting and reacting to the overload traffic on the network. Data security is related to the security mechanism being used by sender and receiver nodes during communication. Linux users, which have rapidly increased in the last five years and most of the Healthcare data centers are being deployed on the Linux operating system, focus the researchers to work on Linux to enhance its performance and security accordingly. The Linux operating system uses TCP CUBIC as a congestion control mechanism with TCP during communication. TCP CUBIC became the default congestion control mechanism of Linux in 2006 after kernel 2.6.18. TCP CUBIC is fundamentally a loss based TCP congestion control mechanism and at each packet loss detection, it reduces its Congestion Window ( $cwnd$ c w n d ) size 20 percent instead of 50 percent as in trademark congestion control mechanism Standard TCP. The aim of this paper is to design a new security mechanism that will work with TCP CUBIC to achieve the maximum possible performance and security over the network link. In this paper, Network Simulator 2 (NS-2) is used to compare the performance of TCP CUBIC with state-of-the-art mechanisms in long and short Round Trip Time (RTT), high bandwidth network scenarios. Results show that when new security mechanism is used with TCP CUBIC, overall better performance in the form of protocol fairness, TCP friendliness, goodput, and convergence time is achieved over the network link.