Transmission Control Protocol Sessions Research Articles

TCP/IP stack transport layer performance, privacy, and security issues

Transmission Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) is the backbone of Internet transmission. The Transport Layer of the TCP/IP stack, which includes TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and UDP (User Datagram Protocol) protocols, plays a crucial role in ensuring reliable communication between devices over a network. To come up with measures that make networks more secure, it is important to learn about the vulnerabilities that exist in the transport TCP/IP stack and then have an understanding of the typical attacks carried out in such layer. This paper explores how the TCP Protocol works, the TCP/IP 3 Way Handshake, TCP Header Structure, the typical vulnerabilities and the classical attacks of transport layer TCP/IP, tools, and solutions adopted to prevent and reduce the chances of some of these attacks. The findings indicated that the major TCP/ IP stack transport layer threats include Finger printing, SYN Flood, TCP reassembly and sequencing, IP Spoofing, TCP session hijacking, RST and FIN denial of service attack, Ping of Death, Low Rate/ Shrew Attacks. Their preventive measures and mechanisms are discussed.

Highly Concurrent TCP Session Connection Management System on FPGA Chip

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is a connection-oriented data transmission protocol, and it is also the main communication protocol used for end-to-end data transmission in the current Internet. At present, the mainstream TCP protocol processing service is implemented by software running on the Central Processing Unit (CPU). However, with the rapid growth of transmission bandwidth and the number of connections, the software-based processing method is not ideal in terms of delay and throughput, and also affects the processing performance of the CPU in other applications such as virtualization services. Moreover, other hardware solutions can only support a limited number of TCP session connections. In order to improve the processing efficiency of the TCP protocol and achieve highly concurrent network services, this paper proposes a TCP offload engine (TOE) prototype system based on field programmable gate array (FPGA) chips. It not only provides hardware-based data path processing, but also realizes hardware management of large-scale TCP session connection status through a multi-level cache management mechanism. Studies have shown that this solution can support 100 Gbps high-performance throughput characteristics, and allow concurrent processing of hundreds to 250,000 TCP connection state hardware maintenance on a single network node, improving the overall performance of the network system.

Optimizing Data Transport Efficiency in Datacenters through Traffic Shaping of BBR Congestion Control

Compared to commonly used loss-based congestion control algorithms predominantly used in Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) implementations, congestion-based congestion control called BBR has shown much better performance in resource-abundant modern communication links. However, for a high influx of TCP sessions on the bottleneck switch, clusters in High-Performance Compute (HPC) nodes and data centers face resource constraints because of the immense workload during orchestration and relocation of workflows across the resource pool. This article discusses how to resolve this problem, commonly known as TCP incast, through efficient queue management of the bottleneck link and adding a shaper function in the standard BBR algorithm. We analyzed TCP incast issue for two efficient versions of congestion control i.e., BBR and CUBIC (named after the cubic function used instead of linear function), in a highly overloaded convergent switch of the cluster. It is noticeable that the queuing delay and buffer build-up are two essential parameters in causing TCP Incast. Hence, we used the M/G/1/B queuing model when multiple TCP sessions generate the network traffic and different buffer build-up scenarios are analyzed in the bottleneck node of HPC clusters. Based on the findings of our queuing analysis, we propose an incast recovery BBR algorithm that introduces additional controls like Incast shaping to deal with queue build-up during TCP incast. The effects of these modifications in BBR implementation are studied in terms of performance parameters like flow completion time, throughput, RTT variations, and fairness to other competing flows are significant compared with standard BBR and CUBIC implementations.

Modelling and analysis of TCP congestion control mechanisms using stochastic reward nets

Modelling of congestion control mechanisms of the transmission control protocol (TCP) helps to obtain parametric results that help to better understand the TCP behaviour under different operating conditions. Several analytical models were proposed to analyse the behaviour of TCP congestion control mechanisms. However, most of these models were designed for a few TCP sessions with non-persistent connections. A few analytical studies were presented for modelling persistent TCP connections. Nevertheless, these studies have many limiting assumptions and are not scalable. In this work, a stochastic reward nets model is introduced for the TCP Reno with the persistent TCP connections, which share two bottleneck links in a wide area network. A microscopic approach was used for constructing the proposed model that captures most features of congestion control mechanisms used by the TCP Reno, and interactions between different TCP sessions. The proposed model relaxed several limiting assumptions adopted by other related models introduced in the literature. To validate the proposed model, analytical results are extensively compared with simulation results.

Multipath TCP in LTE Networks

The results of experiments with Multipath TCP (Multipath Transmission Control Protocol) in LTE (3GPP Long Term Evolution) networks are presented. Our results show increased resiliency and availability of network Multipath TCP connection. Using multiple sub-flows over diverse network paths inside Multipath TCP session results in greatly increased bandwidth and availability. When Multipath TCP is used the behavior of this protocol is consistent in situation of adding new sub-flow or removing flow on a faulty line. Different strategies for path selection are possible with great impact on Multipath TCP session performance. Network structure consisting of few connections with similar parameters is optimal for full mesh Multipath TCP path topology. In this case the behavior of Multipath TCP predictable.

A variable structure control approach to active queue management for TCP with ECN

It has been shown that the transmission control protocol (TCP) connections through the congested routers can be modeled as a feedback dynamic system. In this paper, we design a variable structure (VS) based control scheme in active queue management (AQM) supporting explicit congestion notification (ECN). By analyzing the robustness and performance of the control scheme for the nonlinear TCP/AQM model, we show that the proposed design has good performance and robustness with respect to the uncertainties of the round-trip time (RTT) and the number of active TCP sessions, which are central to the notion of AQM. Implementation issues are discussed and ns simulations are provided to validate the design and compare its performance to other peer schemes' in different scenarios. The results show that the proposed design significantly outperforms the peer AQM schemes in terms of packet loss ratio, throughput and buffer fluctuation.

Analysis and design of controllers for AQM routers supporting TCP flows

In active queue management (AQM), core routers signal transmission control protocol (TCP) sources with the objective of managing queue utilization and delay. It is essentially a feedback control problem. Based on a recently developed dynamic model of TCP congestion-avoidance mode, this paper does three things: 1) it relates key network parameters such as the number of TCP sessions, link capacity and round-trip time to the underlying feedback control problem; 2) it analyzes the present de facto AQM standard: random early detection (RED) and determines that REDs queue-averaging is not beneficial; and 3) it recommends alternative AQM schemes which amount to classical proportional and proportional-integral control. We illustrate our results using ns simulations and demonstrate the practical impact of proportional-integral control on managing queue utilization and delay.