RFC 3649 (rfc3649) - Page 1 of 34
HighSpeed TCP for Large Congestion Windows
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
Network Working Group S. Floyd
Request for Comments: 3649 ICSI
Category: Experimental December 2003
HighSpeed TCP for Large Congestion Windows
Status of this Memo
This memo defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet
community. It does not specify an Internet standard of any kind.
Discussion and suggestions for improvement are requested.
Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2003). All Rights Reserved.
Abstract
The proposals in this document are experimental. While they may be
deployed in the current Internet, they do not represent a consensus
that this is the best method for high-speed congestion control. In
particular, we note that alternative experimental proposals are
likely to be forthcoming, and it is not well understood how the
proposals in this document will interact with such alternative
proposals.
This document proposes HighSpeed TCP, a modification to TCP's
congestion control mechanism for use with TCP connections with large
congestion windows. The congestion control mechanisms of the current
Standard TCP constrains 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 83,333 segments, and a packet drop rate
of at most one congestion event every 5,000,000,000 packets (or
equivalently, at most one congestion event every 1 2/3 hours). This
is widely acknowledged as an unrealistic constraint. To address this
limitation of TCP, this document proposes HighSpeed TCP, and solicits
experimentation and feedback from the wider community.
Floyd Experimental