Performance Evaluation and Comparison of Transport Protocols for Fast Long-Distance Networks

Abstract

It is well known that TCP does not fully utilize the available bandwidth in fast long-distance networks. To solve this scalability problem, several high speed transport protocols have been proposed. They include Highspeed TCP (HS-TCP), Scalable TCP (S-TCP), Binary increase control TCP (BIC-TCP), and H-TCP. These protocols increase (decrease) their window size more aggressively (slowly) compared to standard TCP (STD-TCP). This paper aims at evaluating and comparing these high speed transport protocols through computer simulations. We select six metrics that are important for high speed protocols; scalability, buffer requirement, TCP friendliness, TCP compatibility, RTT fairness, and responsiveness. Simulation scenarios are carefully designed to investigate the performance of these protocols in terms of the metrics. Results clarify that each high speed protocol successfully solves the problem of STD-TCP. In terms of the buffer requirement, S-TCP and BIC-TCP have better performance. For TCP friendliness and compatibility, HS-TCP and H-TCP offer better performance. For RTT fairness, BIC-TCP and H-TCP are superior. For responsiveness, HS-TCP and H-TCP are preferred. However, H-TCP achieves a high degree of fairness at the expense of the link utilization. Thus, we understand that all the proposed high speed transport protocols have their own shortcomings. Thus, much more research is needed on high speed transport protocols.