A Receiver-Driven Transport Protocol for the Web

In this paper, we present a receiver-oriented, request/response protocol for the Web that is compatible with the dynamics of TCP's congestion control algorithm. The protocol, called WebTP, is designed to be completely receiver-based in terms of transport initiation, flow-control and congestion-control. We propose a dual window-cum-rate based congestion control mechanism that is compatible with parallel TCP flows, and in fact interacts better with a congested network state. In support of our receiver-driven design, we developed a novel retransmission scheme that is robust to delay variations. The resulting flows achieve efficient network utilization and are qualitatively fair in their interaction amongst themselves and even with competing TCP flows. The paper also provides detailed simulation results to support the protocol design.