TCP Wave: A new reliable transport approach for future internet

Abstract

Current and future communication scenarios are very different from those in which TCP was conceived and developed, bringing new protocol requirements. Performance optimization is usually pursued with patching of the traditional TCP implementations. Following an alternative approach, TCP Wave has been designed with the primary goal to satisfy new requirements coming from current networks, such as adaptation to bandwidth/delay changes (due to mobility, dynamic switching, handover), efficient management of spurious losses as well as link interruption, optimal exploitation of very high link capacity and efficient transmission of small objects, as in most of Web applications (Web browsing, sensor apps, SCADA, M2M, etc.), irrespective of the underlying link characteristics. Protocol fairness, TCP friendliness, congestion and flow control and error recovery are also guaranteed. TCP Wave replaces the window-based transmission paradigm of the standard TCP with a burst-based transmission, the ACK-clock scheduling with a self-managed timer and the RTT-based congestion control loop with an Ack-based Capacity and Congestion Estimation (ACCE) module. As a valuable study case, the novel TCP Wave capabilities has been validated on a generic NS-3 simulation testbed where all the most challenging events impacting on transport protocol can occur.