RFC 3649 (rfc3649) - Page 2 of 34
HighSpeed TCP for Large Congestion Windows
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 3649 HighSpeed TCP December 2003
Table of Contents
1. Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. The Problem Description.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. Design Guidelines.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
4. Non-Goals.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
5. Modifying the TCP Response Function.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
6. Fairness Implications of the HighSpeed Response
Function. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
7. Translating the HighSpeed Response Function into
Congestion Control Parameters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
8. An alternate, linear response functions.. . . . . . . . . . . . 13
9. Tradeoffs for Choosing Congestion Control Parameters. . . . . . 16
9.1. The Number of Round-Trip Times between Loss Events . . . . 17
9.2. The Number of Packet Drops per Loss Event, with Drop-Tail. 17
10. Related Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
10.1. Slow-Start. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
10.2. Limiting burstiness on short time scales. . . . . . . . . 19
10.3. Other limitations on window size. . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
10.4. Implementation issues.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
11. Deployment issues. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
11.1. Deployment issues of HighSpeed TCP. . . . . . . . . . . . 20
11.2. Deployment issues of Scalable TCP . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
12. Related Work in HighSpeed TCP. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
13. Relationship to other Work.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
14. Conclusions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
15. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
16. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
17. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
18. Security Considerations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
19. IANA Considerations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
A. TCP's Loss Event Rate in Steady-State. . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
B. A table for a(w) and b(w). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
C. Exploring the time to converge to fairness . . . . . . . . . . 32
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Full Copyright Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
1. Introduction
This document proposes HighSpeed TCP, a modification to TCP's
congestion control mechanism for use with TCP connections with large
congestion windows. In a steady-state environment, with a packet
loss rate p, the current Standard TCP's average congestion window is
roughly 1.2/sqrt(p) segments. This places a serious constraint on
the congestion windows that can be achieved by TCP in realistic
environments. For example, for a Standard TCP connection with 1500-
byte packets and a 100 ms round-trip time, achieving a steady-state
throughput of 10 Gbps would require an average congestion window of
Floyd Experimental