Abstract
Paper investigates transport control protocol (TCP) acknowledgment (ACK) optimization in low power or embedded devices to improve their performance on high-speed links by limiting the ACK rate. Today the dominant protocol for interconnecting network devices is the TCP and it has a great influence on the entire network operation if the processing power of network devices is exhausted to the processing data from the TCP stack. Therefore, on high-speed not congested networks the bottleneck is no longer the network link but low-processing power network devices. A new ACK optimization algorithm has been developed and implemented in the Linux kernel. Proposed TCP stack modification minimizes the unneeded technical expenditure from TCP flow by reducing the number of ACKs. The results of performed experiments show that TCP ACK rate limiting leads to the noticeable decrease of CPU utilization on low power devices and an increase of TCP session throughput but does not impact other TCP QoS parameters, such as session stability, flow control, connection management, congestion control or compromises link security. Therefore, more resources of the low-power network devices could be allocated for high-speed data transfer.
Highlights
The expansion of the Internet contributed to an exponential increase in network applications and, as a consequence, to increase the speed and productivity requirements of embedded and mobile devices
Today a major number of the Internet of Things (IoT) and embedded devices use the Linux operating system with the transport control protocol (TCP)/IP stack implemented in Linux kernel, while application-layer protocols are implemented in user space (HTTP, FTP, SSH, etc.)
The upper limit of ACK rate reduction should be carefully determined based on the congestion window (CWND) and the network conditions
Summary
The expansion of the Internet contributed to an exponential increase in network applications and, as a consequence, to increase the speed and productivity requirements of embedded and mobile devices. Today a major number of the Internet of Things (IoT) and embedded devices use the Linux operating system with the transport control protocol (TCP)/IP stack implemented in Linux kernel, while application-layer protocols are implemented in user space (HTTP, FTP, SSH, etc.). Such a choice of operating system liberates manufacturers from the long and expensive development process and shortens the hardware and software development lifecycle of new Internet-connected equipment [1]. The transmission of TCP packets consumes all CPU resources of these devices and reduces TCP performance due to increased round-trip time (RTT), jitter, and an unstable TCP session
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