Context-aware TCP/IP

  • Authors:

  • Carey Williamson;Qian Wu

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada T2N 1N4;University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada T2N 1N4

  • Venue:
  • SIGMETRICS '02 Proceedings of the 2002 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

This paper discusses the design and evaluation of CATNIP, a Context-Aware Transport/Network Internet Protocol for the Web. This integrated protocol uses application-layer knowledge (i.e., Web document size) to provide explicit context information to the TCP and IP protocols. While this approach violates the traditional layered Internet protocol architecture, it enables informed decision-making, both at network endpoints and at network routers, regarding flow control, congestion control, and packet discard decisions.The ns-2 network simulator is used to evaluate the performance of the context-aware TCP/IP approach, using a simple network topology and a synthetic Web workload. Simulation results indicate a 10-20% reduction in TCP packet loss using simple endpoint control mechanisms. More importantly, using CATNIP context information at IP routers can produce 20-80% reductions in the mean Web page retrieval times, and 60-90% reductions in the standard deviation of retrieval times.