Transmission Control Protocol Variants Research Articles

RTTV-TCP: Adaptive congestion control algorithm based on RTT variations for mmWave networks

Internet applications such as video gaming virtual/ augmented reality necessitate efficient fifth-generation (5G) millimeter-wave (mmWave) cellular networks. The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is an essential protocol for network connectivity. However, TCP faces challenges in efficiently utilizing the available bandwidth of 5G mmWave cellular networks while maintaining low latency, mainly due to constraints like Non-Line of Sight (NLoS) conditions. This paper introduces Round-Trip-Time Variations-TCP (RTTV-TCP), enhancing TCP performance in 5G mmWave cellular networks. Simulation scenarios for a 5G mmWave cellular network have been conducted to evaluate RTTV-TCP’s performance, comparing it to legacy TCP variants such as NewReno, HighSpeed, CUBIC, Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip propagation time (BBR), FB-TCP (Fuzzy Based-TCP). The results demonstrate that RTTV-TCP achieves higher average throughput than these TCP variants while maintaining the same level of delay in 5G mmWave cellular networks. RTTV-TCP outperforms NewReno and CUBIC by a very significant margin, demonstrating a 208% improvement compared to HighSpeed and a 6% increase compared to BBR protocol in the worst Packet Error Rate (PER) scenario and when the buffer size matches the Bandwidth Delay Product (BDP).

A survey of transmission control protocol variants

TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), is a reliable connection oriented end-to-end protocol. It contains within itself, mechanisms for ensuring reliability by requiring the receiver to acknowledge the segments that it receives. The network is not perfect and a small percentage of packets are lost enroute, either due to network error or due to the fact that there is congestion in the network and the routers are dropping packets. TCP ensures reliability by starting a timer whenever it sends a segment. If it does not receive an acknowledgement from the receiver within the ‘time-out’ interval then it retransmits the segment. In this paper a review of various TCP is carried out. There are a number of TCP variants for application in the management of network efficiency in terms of network congestion and transmission efficiency. These variants include: - TCP Tahoe, TCP Reno, TCP New Reno, TCP Vegas, TCP SACK, TCP FACK, TCP Asym, TCP RBP, Full TCP and TCP CUBIC. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to study the tcp types on the network performance variances. All have different features and advantages but with maximal throughput as main objective, which are termed as the clones of TCP, have been incorporated into TCP/IP protocol for handling congestion efficiently in different network scenarios.

TCP Stratos for stratosphere based computing platforms

Stratosphere computing platforms (SCPs) benefit from free cooling but face challenges necessitating transmission control protocol (TCP) re-design. The redesign should be considered due to stratospheric gravity waves (SGWs), and sudden stratospheric warming (SSWs). SGWs, and SSWs disturb the wireless channel during SCPs packet communications. SCP packet transmission can be done using existing TCP variants at the expense of high packet loss as existing TCP variants do not consider SGWs, and SSWs. TCP variants designed for satellite links are not suitable as they do not explicitly consider the SSW, and SGW. Moreover, the use of SCPs in future internet is at a nascent stage. The presented research proposes a new TCP variant i.e., TCP Stratos. TCP Stratos incorporates a parameter transfer mechanism and comprises loss-based; and delay-based components. However, its window evolution considers the occurrence of SSWs, and SGWs. The performance benefit of the proposed approach is evaluated via MATLAB numerical simulation. MATLAB simulation has been used because of the consideration of the stratosphere. The modelling of the stratosphere in this case is challenging for conventional tools and frameworks. Performance evaluation shows that using TCP Stratos instead of existing TCP variants and improved TCP variants reduces the packet loss rate by an average of (7.1–23.1) % and (3.8–12.8) %, respectively. The throughput is enhanced by an average of (20.5–53)%, and (40.9–70)% when TCP Stratos is used instead of existing TCP variant and modified TCP variant, respectively.

Analysis of TCP Issues and Their Possible Solutions in the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is widely known as a revolutionary paradigm that offers communication among different types of devices. The primary goal of this paradigm is to implement efficient and high-quality smart services. It requires a protocol stack that offers different service requirements for inter-communication between different devices. Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP) are used as transport layer protocols in IoT to provide the quality of service needed in various IoT devices. IoT encounters many shortcomings of wireless networks, while also posing new challenges due to its uniqueness. When TCP is used in an IoT system, a variety of challenging issues have to be dealt with. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of various issues which arises due to the heterogeneous characteristics of IoT. We identify main issues such as Retransmission Timeout (RTO) algorithm issue, congestion and packet loss issue, header overhead, high latency issue, link layer interaction issue, etc. Moreover, we provide several most probable solutions to the above-mentioned issues in the case of IoT scenarios. RTO algorithm issue has been resolved by using algorithms such as CoCoA, CoCoA+, and CoCoA++. Apart from these, the high latency issue has been solved with the help of a long lived connection and TCP Fast open. Congestion and packet loss issue has been resolved by using several TCP variants such as TCP New Reno, Tahoe, Reno, Vegas, and Westwood.

Introducing a New TCP Variant for UAV networks following comparative simulations

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is a reliable, connection oriented, congestion control mechanism, currently utilized the majority of both wired and wireless networks at the transport layer. An important function of TCP is the network congestion control mechanism; it governs the packet transmission rate and us enables the protocol to respond to congestion signals. Considering the wide spectrum of requirements stemming from unique network and channel characteristics, there exist numerous variants of TCP. While is commonly utilized in applications requiring reliable and ordered reception of packets, the standard TCP congestion control mechanism demonstrates poor performance in high-mobility wireless networking scenarios, as high mobility implies unreliable radio links and consecutive re-transmissions. In this paper we performed a comparative analysis of a spectrum of TCP variants, with the ultimate goal of deriving best practices to support real-time, yet reliable communication in high-mobility scenarios, with a special focus on aerial mobile ad hoc networks composed of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Following the findings of this simulation evaluation, we introduce a new TCP variant for Flying Ad hoc Networks (FANETs), named Swarm HTCP (S-HTCP), which is shown to outperform the other variants in such network conditions.

Packet transport for maritime communications: A streaming coded UDP approach

The maritime communication network (MCN) plays an important role in the 6th generation (6G) system development. In MCNs, packet transport over long-distance lossy links will be ubiquitous. Transmission control protocol (TCP), the dominant transport protocol in the past decades, have had performance issues in such links. In this paper, we propose a novel transport approach which uses user datagram protocol (UDP) along with a simple yet effective bandwidth estimator for congestion control, and with a proactive packet-level forward erasure correction (FEC) code called streaming code to provide low-delay loss recovery without data retransmissions at all. We show that the approach can effectively address two issues of the state-of-the-art TCP variants in the long-distance lossy links, namely 1) the low bandwidth utilization caused by the slow increase of the congestion window (CWND) due to long round-trip time (RTT) and the frequent CWND drop due to random and congestion losses, and 2) the high end-to-end in-order delivery delay when re-transmissions are incurred to recover lost packets. In addition, we show that the scheme's goodput has good smoothness and short-term intra-protocol fairness properties, which are beneficial for multimedia streaming and interactive applications that are prominent parts of today's wireless traffic.

Priority based flow control protocol for internet of things built on light fidelity

<span>Excessive usage of Internet by most of the applications that use internet of things (IoT) has resulted in need for high bandwidth network. Light fidelity (LiFi) is one such network having bandwidth in terms of GigaHertz, but LiFi has a limited propagation range hence it can be deployed only in the local area. When IoT nodes are connected using LiFi network in the local area they start pushing large data to the cloud there by arising need for flow control. Some of the IoT applications such as patient monitoring systems and nuclear systems, generate critical data. The protocol for flow control in this case should be based on priority of data since critical data with high priority have to be transmitted first. We develop a flow control protocol named priority based flow control protocol (PFCP) by providing priority to flows that carry critical data especially in IoT system that use LiFi network. We evaluate performance of different transmission control protocol (TCP) variants and modify TCP variant that yields maximum goodput according to the priority based protocol developed and demonstrate that flows that carry critical data are given priority compared to non-prioritized flows</span>

A novel Delay-based Adaptive Congestion Control TCP variant

Delay-based congestion control policies of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) mainly use the Round-Trip-Time (RTT) and bottleneck queue size to detect congestion. However, these policies identify congestion by only taking into account the contribution of their own data flow. Thus, the congestion identification in these policies fails to be completely accurate. Moreover, these policies experience many packet losses resulting in retransmissions, which can further reduce channel utilization. This article proposes a queuing delay variation-based adaptive congestion control TCP variant, called Delay-based Adaptive Congestion Control (DACC), that considers the presence of background flows. DACC quickly adapts to the current network conditions and adjusts the transmission rate accordingly. The simulation results exemplify the significance of DACC as it yields better outcomes in terms of goodput, Packet Loss Ratio (PLR), inter-protocol fairness, intra-protocol fairness, and fast file transfers.

TCP-LoRaD: A Loss Recovery and Differentiation Algorithm for Improving TCP Performance over MANETs in Noisy Channels

Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) are becoming popular technologies because they offer flexibility in setting up anytime and anywhere, and provide communication support on the go. This communication requires the use of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) which is not originally designed for use in MANET environments; therefore, it raises serious performance issues. To overcome the deficiency of the original TCP, several modifications have been proposed and reported in the networking literature. TCP-WELCOME (Wireless Environment, Link losses, and Congestion packet loss ModEls) is one of the better TCP variants suitable for MANETs. However, it has been found that this protocol has problems with packet losses because of network congestion as it adopts the original congestion control mechanism of TCP New Reno. We also found that TCP-WELCOME does not perform well in noisy channel conditions in wireless environments. In this paper, we propose a novel loss recovery and differentiation algorithm (called TCP-LoRaD) to overcome the above-mentioned TCP problems. We validate the performance of TCP-LoRaD through an extensive simulation setup using Riverbed Modeler (formerly OPNET). Results obtained show that the proposed TCP-LoRaD offers up to 20% higher throughput and about 15% lower end-to-end delays than the TCP-WELCOME in a noisy channel under medium to high traffic loads.

Towards AI-enabled traffic management in multipath TCP: A survey

Numerous applications on the web use transmission control protocol (TCP) as a transport protocol to ensure efficient and fair sharing of network resources among users. With the increased complexity in wired/wireless networks, many end-to-end congestion control (CC) algorithms have been proposed in the literature, offering solutions through their proposed TCP variants. In contrast to this, machine learning has attained great success in tackling end-to-end CC for future networks. This survey investigates the most recent research contributions on learning-based CC in general and deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based CC in particular for traffic management in multi-path TCP (MPTCP). From the literature, it is observed that DRL is a pivotal domain for learning-based CC algorithms in highly dynamic wireless communication networks. We pinpoint key outcomes, corresponding challenges and unaddressed issues. Moreover, this survey delineates the limitations, research challenges, insights, and future opportunities to advance DRL-based traffic management in MPTCP.

Performance analysis of high-speed TCP protocols in LTE X2 handover under realistic operational conditions

Broadband mobile networks have rapidly evolved over the last years. The unique environment they operate, however, sets new challenges for the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). In this paper, we study the impact of Long Term Evolution (LTE) handover on TCP performance with different TCP congestion control algorithms and in a wide range of networks settings, including different handover types, random channel errors and support of error correction at lower layers. Our results suggest that the congestion control algorithms employed by TCP variants during the LTE X2 handover have different impacts on TCP performance. In particular CUBIC, Scalable TCP and BIC-TCP achieve high goodput and fast window convergence in available channel capacity after LTE X2 handover. In environments involving packet drops that are not corrected at lower layers and single errors with high probability, all TCP variants exhibit very low performance levels. Finally, in terms of fairness, our results identify fairness issues among TCP flows with different Bandwidth Delay Products (BDP), with CUBIC offering the best results.

Congestion Control: A Renaissance with Machine Learning

In the past several decades, it has been well known that the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), even with its modern variants such as CUBIC, may not perform optimally when available bottleneck bandwidth needs to be fully utilized, yet without unnecessarily increasing the end-to-end latency. These observations have led to a recent resurgence of interest in the topic of redesigning congestion control protocols and replacing modern TCP variants using machine learning. In this article, we examine and compare some of the most prominent recent research results on the use of machine learning to redesign congestion control protocols, with an editorial commentary on potential research directions in the near-term future.

Analyzing Reliable Transport Layer Protocol Performance

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is a reliable protocol uses for transferring data end to end in the network. It is used by many internet applications. It was originally designed to handle congestion issue in the network. It has many variants like Tahoe, Reno, New Reno. This paper presents the performance of different variants of TCP to identify how they work with varying network characteristics. The simulation is done with the help of NS2. The results show how different variants give their performance on delay, packet drops, and throughput. This is immensely important analysis, to know which variant is better for a specific criterion. This paper covers many variants and their nature of handling congestion regarding to changes in the network.

TCP Performance Over Satellite-Based Hybrid FSO/RF Vehicular Networks: Modeling and Analysis

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in Internet access from space assisted by low earth orbit (LEO) satellite networks. In the domain of the last-mile access for the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), hybrid free-space optical (FSO)/radio-frequency (RF) communication has recently attracted worldwide research efforts. While the transmission control protocol (TCP) is the most widely deployed transport protocol on the Internet, its performance in the error-prone environment of LEO satellite-assisted hybrid FSO/RF vehicular networks is not well understood. This paper develops a comprehensive analytical model based on the cross-layer approach for TCP performance, considering the FSO and RF satellite fading channels, modeled by the Gamma-Gamma and Nakagami- m distributions, respectively. The error-control solutions, including the Reed-Solomon (RS) code and Selective repeat automatic repeat request (SR-ARQ), are also employed. Numerical results quantitatively demonstrate the impact of transmission errors at last-mile links and different parameters/settings of error-control solutions on the TCP performance. The paper also supports the selection of proper TCP variants for the considered networks.

QoE evaluation of dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH) with promising transport layer protocols

Recently, dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH) has become an increasingly popular way to view video over the Internet. In particular compared to other video streaming services these DASH approaches deliver superior QoE to viewers. This is due to improved video segment selection. Generally, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) CUBIC is the defacto transport layer protocol use by DASH. To improve the robustness of the transport layer to network congestion many other TCP variants were implemented such as Compound TCP and BBR. Nevertheless some were made to work specifically in LAN environments for example Agile-SD. However, recently another transport layer protocol User Datagram Protocol (UDP) has been used in Google’s QUIC implementation. To date no work has be found giving the performance of these transport layer protocols with DASH. In this paper we test the performance of Agile-SD, CUBIC, Compound TCP, BBR and QUIC using the BBA, MPC, Pensieve and Oboe DASH approaches. Experiments simulate congested bottleneck link conditions common at household routers where families view multiple videos at the same time. We observe Oboe and Agile-SD is the most promising combination with CUBIC and Pensieve next. However, even though QUIC was touted to have superior transport layer performance by Google it was the worst performing.

Throughput stability and flow fairness enhancement of TCP traffic in multi-hop wireless networks

In the multi-hop wireless network, transmission control protocol (TCP) throughput stability and flow fairness performances are worsened due to slower flow convergence in the loss recovery phase and flat-rate reduction during the congestion control process. In this article, a combination of network-assisted and window utilization based congestion control approach, known as feedback assisted improved recovery + (FAIR+), is proposed to overcome TCP's limitations under multi-hop wireless networks. The proposed FAIR+ algorithm initiates the congestion control process based on the queue level notification of the relay node and trims down the sending rate based on TCP flow's utilization level. In the congestion recovery phase, the FAIR+ algorithm implements a newer window increment pattern that achieves a faster convergence rate than the existing RFC 6582 implementation. The throughput stability of the FAIR+ algorithm is validated using the duality model and multi-hop wireless simulation. The simulation results convincingly prove that the FAIR+ attains significant improvement in throughput, flow fairness, and end-to-end latency performance over the existing TCP variants (OQS, NRT, and Westwood).

Stateful-TCP—A New Approach to Accelerate TCP Slow-Start

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the pillars of the Internet. Therefore extensive research has been conducted to improve its performance, primarily via optimizing TCP's congestion control algorithm. In this work, we show that besides congestion control, TCP's Slow-Start algorithm is increasingly becoming a bottleneck in modern high-speed networks. To tackle the problem, we propose a different approach called Stateful-TCP, where path bandwidth estimated in a previous flow is used to instantly ramp up the transmission rate of the subsequent flow to the same destination. This eliminates the need for bandwidth probing in conventional Slow-Start, enabling TCP to efficiently utilize the available path bandwidth right from the beginning. We applied Stateful-TCP to Linux's default TCP implementation - Cubic, to form S-Cubic and evaluated its performance via extensive emulations and Internet experiments. Results from independent Internet experiments using over 1,000 end-user clients showed that S-Cubic could reduce FCT by 37.5% and increase throughput by over 50% compared to Cubic. As opposed to an entirely new TCP design, Stateful-TCP is designed to complement congestion control and thus could potentially be applied to many of the existing TCP variants, as well as incorporated into future TCP designs.

Improving TCP Performance in Vehicle-To-Grid (V2G) Communication

On a connected car, the performance of Internet access will significantly affect the user experience. For electric cars that use vehicle-to-grid (V2G) communication to interact with the Internet during charging, the charge cable quality poses a challenge to the V2G communication. Specifically, the performance of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), the transport protocol that most Internet applications use, may suffer due to the high noise and consequent errors that the charge cable presents. Currently, TCP NewReno is the TCP implementation that ISO 15118 standard stipulates for the V2G communication. However, its congestion control algorithm has been designed for the general Internet environment where congestion, not link errors, account for most of packet losses. Indeed, we confirm that the throughput of TCP NewReno rapidly degrades as the error rate increases on the charge cable. Specifically, we show that other TCP variants such as TCP Illinois far exceeds TCP NewReno in both lossy and non-lossy link environments. Finally, we propose how to configure TCP NewReno parameters to make it achieve the throughput comparable to other TCP variants on V2G communication environments, regardless of the link quality presented by the charging cable.

Impact of Frame Duration and Modulation Coding Schemes With WiMAX Bandwidth Asymmetry in Transmission Control Protocol Variants

WiMAX stands for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access which is based on IEEE 802.16 specification and is considered as de facto standard for the broadband wireless data transfer over the internet. The different values of various WiMAX parameters for different TCP variants may affect the performance of the network. This article compares the performance of different TCP variants with bandwidth asymmetry, frame duration, and modulation coding schemes, along with the operating parameter namely number of wireless nodes. During the simulation study the performance was evaluated only for one-way data transfer. The finding suggests that the TCP New Reno performed better than other variants included in the simulation study for the comparison. The performance was measured on the basis of throughput, goodput and packets dropped.

Impact of Delayed Acknowledgments on Transport Layer Performance over Low Orbit Constellations

Satellite transmissions can suffer from high channel impairments, especially on the link between a satellite and a mobile end user. To cope with these errors, physical and link-layer reliability schemes have been introduced at the price of an increased end-to-end delay seen by the transport layer [for example, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)]. By default, the TCP enables delayed acknowledgment (DelAck) that might increase the end-to-end delay when performing over satellite link-layer recovery schemes. As a matter of fact, even if this option enables decreasing the feedback path load and the stack processing overhead, it might be counterproductive in a satellite context. This motivates the present paper, which aims to quantify the impact of such a TCP option in the context of low Earth orbit satellite constellations. Several simulation measurements are performed with two well-deployed TCP variants, and it is shown that DelAck should be disabled when used over link-layer Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request schemes, particularly when these schemes enable reordering the buffer.