SpeedDetect: a simple TCP extension for handling sudden capacity increase

  • Authors:

  • Gergely Biczók;Gábor Németh;Péter Tarján;Ferenc Kubinszky;András Veres

  • Affiliations:

  • Traffic Analysis and Network Performance Lab, Ericsson Research and Department of Telecommunications and Media Informatics, Budapest University of Technology and Economics;Traffic Analysis and Network Performance Lab, Ericsson Research;Department of Telecommunications and Media Informatics, Budapest University of Technology and Economics;Traffic Analysis and Network Performance Lab, Ericsson Research;Traffic Analysis and Network Performance Lab, Ericsson Research

  • Venue:
  • NGI'09 Proceedings of the 5th Euro-NGI conference on Next Generation Internet networks
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Emerging broadband mobile cellular networks are inherently heterogeneous due to the co-existence of multiple wireless access technologies. In such a network sudden capacity changes are bound to happen due to inter-system handovers, user mobility and flow dynamics. Existing congestion control protocols are shown to deal sufficiently with capacity drops but tend to reach full link utilization slowly after abrupt capacity increases. In this paper we prepose SpeedDetect, a simple, sender-side TCP extension for handling sudden capacity increase. The key idea behind our approach is to improve link utilization by explicitly detecting increased link capacity then triggering the underlying congestion control scheme to an aggressive probing regime. We evaluate the performance of SpeedDetect with testbed experiments and simulations. Our findings suggest that the proposed mechanism can significantly improve the reaction time of TCP by detecting sudden capacity increase quickly and consistently. Furthermore, our approach retains the RTT-fairness of the underlying TCP and exhibits favorable interprotocol fairness towards standard TCP NewReno.