Improvements to TCP performance in high-speed ATM networks

Abstract

Performance of TCP connections in high-speed wide-area ATM networks is of great importance due to the widespread use of te TCP/IP protocol for data transfers and the increasing deployment of ATM networks. ATM technology promises substantial gains by allowing the available link bandwidth to be efficiently used by a mix of audio, video, and data traffic. However, certain features of ATM technology lead to a substantial degradation of TCP connection throughput under congestion conditions. The poor performance of TCP has been observed in a number of recent studies [7] and a number of remedies have been proposed [1, 8], but most of the additional mechanisms proposed to improve TCP performance in ATM networks require substantial complication of the ATM switches