On Parallel UDP-Based Transport Control over Dedicated Connections

Abstract

Several research and production high-performance networks now provision multi-Gbps dedicated channels to support large data transfers in network-intensive applications. However, end users have not seen a corresponding increase in application throughput mainly because traditional end-to-end transport methods are not optimized for such connections. New congestion or flow control mechanisms are desirable to meet the challenges brought by dedicated connections to transport protocol design. The advent and proliferation of multi-core processors make it now possible to improve application throughput by providing multiple processing and networking resources to a single data transfer. Based on the existing PLUT method, we propose a new transport method, Para-PLUT, which utilizes multiple parallel UDP connections to take advantage of the full power of multicore processors for maximum aggregate goodput. We implement and test Para-PLUT in a local dedicated network testbed and the experimental results illustrate its superior performance over several existing methods.