Performance evaluation of HTTP/TCP on asymmetric networks

As the number of Internet users grows, new network technologies are emerging. Those include ADSL and cable modem, which essentially provide asymmetric bandwidth for uplink and downlink to the user's connection. In this paper, we investigate the behaviour of HTTP/TCP protocols on such asymmetric networks, and present the analytic results of the mean throughput of TCP. The transfer time of Web documents by HTTP over TCP is also derived. In the analysis, we consider newer HTTP/TCP protocols, HTTP/1.1 and TCP Vegas, in addition to HTTP/1.0 and TCP Tahoe. We then investigate the appropriate combination of HTTP and TCP protocols on the asymmetric network. The results show that the effect of HTTP/1.1 is quite small, but TCP Vegas can improve the performance in asymmetric networks if it is appropriately modified as in our proposal. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Game of protocols: Is QUIC ready for prime time streaming?

Quick User Datagram Protocol (UDP) Internet Connections (QUIC) is an experimental and low‐latency transport protocol proposed by Google, which is still being improved and specified in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The viewer's quality of experience (QoE) in HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS) applications may be improved with the help of QUIC's low‐latency, improved congestion control, and multiplexing features. We measured the streaming performance of QUIC on wireless and cellular networks in order to understand whether the problems that occur when running HTTP over TCP can be reduced by using HTTP over QUIC. The performance of QUIC was tested in the presence of network interface changes caused by the mobility of the viewer. We observed that QUIC resulted in quicker start of media streams, better streaming, and seeking experience, especially during the higher levels of congestion in the network and had a better performance than TCP when the viewer was mobile and switched between the wireless networks. Furthermore, we measured QUIC's performance in an emulated network that had a various amount of losses and delays to evaluate how QUIC's multiplexing feature would be beneficial for HAS applications. We compared the performance of HAS applications using multiplexing video streams with HTTP/1.1 over multiple TCP connections to HTTP/2 over one TCP connection and to QUIC over one UDP connection. To that effect, we observed that QUIC provided better performance than TCP on a network that had large delays. However, QUIC did not provide a significant improvement when the loss rate was large. Finally, we analyzed the performance of the congestion control mechanisms implemented by QUIC and TCP, and tested their ability to provide fairness among streaming clients. We found that QUIC always provided fairness among QUIC flows, but was not always fair to TCP.     

iTCP: an intelligent TCP with neural network based end-to-end congestion control for ad-hoc multi-hop wireless mesh networks

Maintaining the performance of reliable transport protocols, such as transmission control protocol (TCP), over wireless mesh networks (WMNs) is a challenging problem due to the unique characteristics of data transmission over WMNs. The unique characteristics include multi-hop communication over lossy and non-deterministic wireless mediums, data transmission in the absence of a base station, similar traffic patterns over neighboring mesh nodes, etc. One of the reasons for the poor performance of conventional TCP variants over WMNs is that the congestion control mechanisms in conventional TCP variants do not explicitly account for these unique characteristics. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel artificial intelligence based congestion control technique for reliable data transfer over WMNs. The synergy with artificial intelligence is established by exploiting a carefully designed neural network (NN) in the congestion control mechanism. We analyze the proposed NN based congestion control technique in detail and incorporate it into TCP to create a new variant that we name as intelligent TCP or iTCP. We evaluate the performance of iTCP using both ns-2 simulations and real testbed experiments. Our evaluation results demonstrate that our proposed congestion control technique exhibits a significant improvement in total network throughput and average energy consumption per transmitted bit compared to the congestion control techniques used in other TCP variants.     

Optimizing Web delivery over wireless links: design, implementation, and experiences

World over wide-area wireless Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) networks have been upgraded to support the general packet radio service (GPRS). GPRS brings "always-on" wireless data connectivity at bandwidths comparable to that of conventional fixed-line telephone modems. Unfortunately many users have found the reality to be rather different, experiencing very disappointing performance when, for example, browsing the Web over GPRS. In This work, we show what causes the web and its underlying transport protocol TCP to underperform in a GPRS wide-area wireless environment. We examine why certain GPRS network characteristics interact badly with TCP to yield problems such as: link underutilization for short-lived flows, excess queueing for long-lived flows, ACK compression, poor loss recovery, and gross unfairness between competing flows. We also show that many Web browsers tend to be overly aggressive, and by opening too many simultaneous TCP connections can aggravate matters. We present the design and implementation of a web optimizing proxy system called GPRSWeb that mitigates many of the GPRS link-related performance problems with a simple software update to a mobile device. The update is a link-aware middleware (a local "client proxy") that sits in the mobile device, and communicates with a "server proxy" located at the other end of the wireless link, close to the wired-wireless border. The dual-proxy architecture collectively implements a number of key enhancements-an aggressive caching scheme that employs content-based hash keying to improve hit rates for dynamic content, a preemptive push of Web page support resources to mobile clients, resource adaptation to suit client capabilities, delta encoded data transfer of modified pages, DNS lookup migration, and a UDP-based reliable transport protocol that is specifically optimized for use over GPRS. We show that these enhancements results in significant improvement in web performance over GPRS links.     

Performance analysis of next generation web access via satellite

Responsiveness is a critical metric for web performance. Recent work in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has resulted in a new set of web protocols, including definition of the hypertext transfer protocol version 2 (HTTP/2) and a corresponding set of TCP updates. Together, these have been designed to reduce the web page download latency compared with HTTP/1.1. This paper describes the main features of the new protocols and discusses the impact of path delay on their expected performance. It then presents a set of tests to evaluate whether current implementations of the new protocols can offer benefit with an operational satellite access network and suggests how the specifications can evolve and be tuned to further enhance performance for long network paths. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

DHTTP: an efficient and cache-friendly transfer protocol for the web

Today's HTTP carries Web interactions over client-initiated TCP connections. An important implication of using this transport method is that interception caches in the network violate the end-to-end principle of the Internet, which severely limits deployment options of these caches. Furthermore, while an increasing number of Web interactions are short, and in fact frequently carry only control information and no data, TCP is often inefficient for short interactions We propose a new transfer protocol for the Web, called Dual-Transport HTTP (DHTTP), which splits the traffic between UDP and TCP channels. When choosing the TCP channel, it is the server who opens the connection back to the client. Through server-initiated connections, DHTTP upholds the Internet end-to-end principle in the presence of interception caches, thereby allowing unrestricted caching within backbones. Moreover, the comparative performance study of DHTTP and HTTP using trace-driven simulation as well as testing real HTTP and DHTTP servers showed a significant performance advantage of DHTTP when the bottleneck is at the server and comparable performance when the bottleneck is in the network.     

How network asymmetry affects TCP

Several emerging wireline and wireless access network technologies exhibit asymmetry in their network characteristics. For instance, cable modem networks exhibit significant bandwidth asymmetry, while packet radio networks exhibit media access asymmetry. A high degree of asymmetry can have an adverse effect on the performance of feedback-based transport protocols. We study the effects of bandwidth and media access asymmetry on the performance of the TCP protocol. We identify the fundamental reasons for the mismatch between TCP and asymmetric networks, and then present several techniques to address this problem     

Multi-layer loss recovery in TCP over optical burst-switched networks

It is well-known that the bufferless nature of optical burst-switching (OBS) networks cause random burst loss even at low traffic loads. When TCP is used over OBS, these random losses make the TCP sender decrease its congestion window even though the network may not be congested. This results in significant TCP throughput degradation. In this paper, we propose a multi-layer loss-recovery approach with automatic retransmission request (ARQ) and Snoop for OBS networks given that TCP is used at the transport layer. We evaluate the performance of Snoop and ARQ at the lower layer over a hybrid IP-OBS network. Based on the simulation results, the proposed multi-layer hybrid ARQ + Snoop approach outperforms all other approaches even at high loss probability. We developed an analytical model for end-to-end TCP throughput and verified the model with simulation results.     

On Providing Support for Protocol Adaptation in Mobile Wireless Networks

The availability of variety of communication devices offers a choice among networks with vastly different characteristics. No single protocol or application can be expected to perform well over all these networks. A mobile host is likely to encounter these different networks and needs to adapt accordingly. The problem of adapting to a changing network environment is further complicated, because changes in network conditions are usually transparent to higher layers of the protocol stack. In order to allow automatic adaptation of applications and protocols, awareness of link conditions and network environment is necessary. In this paper, we present a uniform mechanism based on ICMP messages for providing information about the environment to the protocol stack. We also show how protocols can adapt to changes in the environment, and in particular, demonstrate dynamic fine tuning of some of the well known protocols such as UDP and TCP. Performance measurements demonstrate that our framework imposes little overheads and improves protocol performance under changing network conditions.     

Scaling analysis of conservative cascades, with applications tonetwork traffic

Previous studies have demonstrated that measured wide-area network traffic such as Internet traffic exhibits locally complex irregularities, consistent with multifractal behavior. It has also been shown that the observed multifractal structure becomes most apparent when analyzing measured network traffic at a particular layer in the well-defined protocol hierarchy that characterizes modern data networks, namely the transport or transmission control protocol (TCP) layer. To investigate this new scaling phenomenon associated with the dynamics of measured network traffic over small time scales, we consider a class of multiplicative processes, the so-called conservative cascades, that serves as a cascade paradigm for and is motivated by the networking application. We present a wavelet-based time/scale analysis of these cascades to determine rigorously their global and local-scaling behavior. In particular, we prove that for the class of multifractals generated by these conservative cascades the multifractal formalism applies and is valid, and we illustrate some of the wavelet-based techniques for inferring multifractal scaling behavior by applying them to a set of wide-area traffic traces     

Optimizing TCP forwarder performance

A TCP forwarder is a network node that establishes and forwards data between a pair of TCP connections. An example of a TCP forwarder is a firewall that places a proxy between a TCP connection to an external host and a TCP connection to an internal host, controlling access to a resource on the internal host. Once the proxy approves the access, it simply forwards data from one connection to the other. We use the term TCP forwarding to describe indirect TCP communication via a proxy in general. This paper characterizes the behavior of TCP forwarding, and illustrates the role TCP forwarding plays in common network services like firewalls and HTTP proxies. We then introduce an optimization technique, called connection splicing, that can be applied to a TCP forwarder, and report the results of a performance study designed to evaluate its impact. Connection splicing improves TCP forwarding performance by a factor of two to four, making it competitive with IP router performance on the same hardware     

A Simulation Study of Scalable TCP and HighSpeed TCP in Geostationary Satellite Networks

This paper investigates the performance of two TCP enhancements (i.e., Scalable TCP and HighSpeed TCP), recently proposed for high-speed backbone networks with a very large bandwidth-delay product, in a geostationary satellite environment. Both persistent and elastic traffic patterns are considered, performance being evaluated in terms of TCP throughput and mean session delay, respectively. The impact of channel characteristics (packet error rate, correlation between successive losses) is widely discussed. Fairness issues are also accounted for, together with the impact of some system parameters, such as the satellite link bandwidth. Extensive comparisons are carried out among Scalable TCP, HighSpeed TCP and other congestion control schemes. The obtained results show the soundness for the use of such protocols in geostationary satellite networks. Indeed, both protocols permit to improve the performance of TCP connections in a wide range of channel conditions, showing (especially Scalable TCP) to be able to cope well with rainy conditions and to exploit a future increase in the satellite link capacity. This work was carried out within the framework of the SatNex Network of Excellence, http://www.satnex.org     

Performance evaluation of high speed TCP over optical burst switching networks

Study of TCP performance over OBS networks has been an important problem of research lately and it was found that due to the congestion control mechanism of TCP and the inherent bursty losses in the Optical Burst Switching (OBS) network, the throughput of TCP connections degrade. On the other hand, High Speed TCP (HSTCP) was proposed as an alternative to the use of TCP in high bandwidth-delay product networks. HSTCP aggressively increases the congestion window used in TCP, when the available bandwidth is high and decreases the window cautiously in response to a congestion event. In this work, we make a thorough simulation study of HSTCP over OBS networks. While the earlier works in the literature used a linear chain of nodes as the network topology for the simulation, we use the popular 14-node NSFNET topology that represents an arbitrary mesh network in our study. We also study the performance of HSTCP over OBS for different bandwidths of access networks. We use two different cases for simulations where in the first HSTCP connections are routed on disjoint paths while in the second they contend for resources in the network links. These cases of simulations along with the mesh topology help us clearly distinguish between the congestion and contention losses in the OBS network and their effect on HSTCP throughput. For completeness of study, we also simulate TCP traffic over OBS networks in all these cases and compare its throughput with that of HSTCP. We observe that irrespective of the access network bandwidth and the burst loss rate in the network, HSTCP outperforms TCP in terms of the throughput and robustness against multiple burst losses up to the expected theoretical burst loss probability of 10⁻³.     

A Smart TCP Acknowledgment Approach for Multihop Wireless Networks

Reliable data transfer is one of the most difficult tasks to be accomplished in multihop wireless networks. Traditional transport protocols like TCP face severe performance degradation over multihop networks given the noisy nature of wireless media as well as unstable connectivity conditions in place. The success of TCP in wired networks motivates its extension to wireless networks. A crucial challenge faced by TCP over these networks is how to operate smoothly with the 802.11 wireless MAC protocol which also implements a retransmission mechanism at link level in addition to short RTS/CTS control frames for avoiding collisions. These features render TCP acknowledgments (ACK) transmission quite costly. Data and ACK packets cause similar medium access overheads despite the much smaller size of the ACKs. In this paper, we further evaluate our dynamic adaptive strategy for reducing ACK-induced overhead and consequent collisions. Our approach resembles the sender side's congestion control. The receiver is self-adaptive by delaying more ACKs under nonconstrained channels and less otherwise. This improves not only throughput but also power consumption. Simulation evaluations exhibit significant improvement in several scenarios     

Web Acceleration in Asymmetrical Mobile Network

End to end performance of web application degrades seriously in mobile networks because the inefficiencies of HTTP and TCP in lossy and asymmetrical environment. In this article, we discussed common architecture of web accelerator which embraces both HTTP and TCP optimization. Based on the feasibility analyses of various acceleration technologies in asymmetrical mobile network, the components of accelerator and their functions are provided. In order to explain how to choose function entities of accelerator and how to optimize their parameters in asymmetrical environment, we carried out three simulation based analyses. Firstly we characterize the correlations between user perceived web response time and asymmetrical link characteristics. Consequently, we show how HTTP compression strongly affects the web response time when uplink resources are limited. At the same time, our study demonstrated that caching scheme performs poorly when uplink quality degraded. In addition, possible potential methods for web response time and their design criteria are discussed.     

Improving UDP and TCP performance in mobile ad hoc networks withINSIGNIA

There is a growing need to provide better service differentiation in mobile ad hoc networks; however, this is challenging. These networks are characterized as being multihop in nature where the wireless topology that interconnects mobile hosts/routers can change rapidly in unpredictable ways or remain relatively static over long periods of time. Power and bandwidth constrained, mobile ad hoc networks typically only support best effort communications where the transport protocol's “goodput” is often lower than the maximum radio transmission rate after encountering the effects of multiple access, fading, noise, and interference. We evaluate three routing protocols with INSIGNIA, an in-band signaling system that supports adaptive reservation-based services in mobile ad hoc networks. INSIGNIA represents a general-purpose approach to delivering quality of service in mobile ad hoc network supporting “operational transparency” between a number of IETF mobile ad hoc network routing protocols that include Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector, Dynamic Source Routing, and the Temporally Ordered Routing Algorithm. We evaluate the performance gains delivered when using INSIGNIA with these MANET routing protocols in support of UDP and TCP traffic. The INSIGNIA ns-2 code used for the study reported in this article is available from the Web at comet.columbia.edu/insignia     

A multilayer IP security protocol for TCP performance enhancement in wireless networks

Transmission control protocol (TCP) performance enhancement proxy (PEP) mechanisms have been proposed, and in some cases widely deployed, to improve TCP performance in all-Internet protocol (IP) wireless networks. However, this technique is conflicted with IP-security (IPsec)-a standard IP security protocol that will make inroad into wireless networks. This paper analyzes the fundamental problem behind this conflict and develops a solution called multilayer IP-security (ML-IPsec). The basic principle is to use a multilayer protection model and a fine grain access control to make IP security protocols compatible with TCP PEP. It allows wireless network operators or service providers to grant base stations or wireless routers limited and controllable access to the TCP headers for performance enhancement purposes. Through careful design, implementation, and evaluation, we show that we can easily add ML-IPsec to existing IPsec software and the overhead is low. We conclude that ML-IPsec can help wireless networks provide both security and performance.     

AN ENHANCEMENT SCHEME OF TCP PROTOCOL IN MOBILE AD HOC NETWORKS： MME-TCP

Transmission Control Protocol （TCP） optimization in Mobile Ad hoc NETworks （MANETs） is a challenging issue because of some unique characteristics of MANETs. In this paper, a new end-to-end mechanism based on multiple metrics measurement is proposed to improve TCP performance in MANETs. Multi-metric Measurement based Enhancement of TCP （MME-TCP） designs the metrics and the identification algorithm according to the characteristics of MANETs and the experiment results. Furthermore, these metrics are measured at the sender node to reduce the overhead of control information over networks. Simulation results show that MME-TCP mechanism achieves a significant performance improvement over standard TCP in MANETs.     

Using TCP flow-aggregation to enhance data experience of cellular wireless users

All over the world Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) cellular mobile networks have been upgraded to support the "always-on" general packet radio service (GPRS). Despite the apparent availability of levels of bandwidth not dissimilar to that provided by conventional fixed-wire telephone modems, the user experience using GPRS is still considerably poor. In this paper, we examine the performance of protocols such as transmission control protocol (TCP) over GPRS, and show how certain network characteristics interact badly with TCP to yield problems such as: link underutilization for short-lived flows, excess queueing for long-lived flows, acknowledgment bunching, poor loss recovery, and gross unfairness between competing flows. We present the design and implementation of a transparent TCP proxy that mitigates many of these problems without requiring any changes to the TCP implementations in either mobile or fixed-wire end systems. The proxy is interposed in the cellular provider's network, and splits TCP connections transparently into two halves-the wired and wireless sides. Connections destined for the same mobile host are treated as an aggregate due to their statistical dependence. We demonstrate packet scheduling and flow control algorithms that use information shared between the connections to maximize performance of the wireless link, while interworking with unmodified TCP peers. We also demonstrate how fairness between flows and response to loss is improved, and that queueing and, hence, network latency is reduced. We discuss how TCP enhancing proxies could be transparently deployed, and conclude that installing such a proxy into GPRS network would be of significant benefit to users.