The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the main protocols of the Internet protocol suite. It originated in the initial network implementation in which it complemented the Internet Protocol (IP). Therefore, the entire suite is commonly referred to as TCP/IP. TCP provides reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of a stream of octets (bytes) between applications running on hosts communicating via an IP network. Major internet applications such as the World Wide Web, email, remote administration, and file transfer rely on TCP, which is part of the Transport layer of the TCP/IP suite. SSL/TLS often runs on top of TCP.
Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) is an extension to the Internet Protocol and to the Transmission Control Protocol and is defined in RFC 3168 (2001). ECN allows end-to-end notification of network congestion without dropping packets. ECN is an optional feature that may be used between two ECN-enabled endpoints when the underlying network infrastructure also supports it.
Network congestion in data networking and queueing theory is the reduced quality of service that occurs when a network node or link is carrying more data than it can handle. Typical effects include queueing delay, packet loss or the blocking of new connections. A consequence of congestion is that an incremental increase in offered load leads either only to a small increase or even a decrease in network throughput.
FAST TCP is a TCP congestion avoidance algorithm especially targeted at long-distance, high latency links, developed at the Netlab, California Institute of Technology and now being commercialized by FastSoft. FastSoft was acquired by Akamai Technologies in 2012.
Van Jacobson is an American computer scientist, renowned for his work on TCP/IP network performance and scaling. He is one of the primary contributors to the TCP/IP protocol stack—the technological foundation of today’s Internet. Since 2013, Jacobson is an adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) working on Named Data Networking.
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) uses a congestion control algorithm that includes various aspects of an additive increase/multiplicative decrease (AIMD) scheme, along with other schemes including slow start and congestion window (CWND), to achieve congestion avoidance. The TCP congestion-avoidance algorithm is the primary basis for congestion control in the Internet. Per the end-to-end principle, congestion control is largely a function of internet hosts, not the network itself. There are several variations and versions of the algorithm implemented in protocol stacks of operating systems of computers that connect to the Internet.
TCP Vegas is a TCP congestion avoidance algorithm that emphasizes packet delay, rather than packet loss, as a signal to help determine the rate at which to send packets. It was developed at the University of Arizona by Lawrence Brakmo and Larry L. Peterson and introduced in 1994.
TCP tuning techniques adjust the network congestion avoidance parameters of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connections over high-bandwidth, high-latency networks. Well-tuned networks can perform up to 10 times faster in some cases. However, blindly following instructions without understanding their real consequences can hurt performance as well.
The additive-increase/multiplicative-decrease (AIMD) algorithm is a feedback control algorithm best known for its use in TCP congestion control. AIMD combines linear growth of the congestion window when there is no congestion with an exponential reduction when congestion is detected. Multiple flows using AIMD congestion control will eventually converge to an equal usage of a shared link. The related schemes of multiplicative-increase/multiplicative-decrease (MIMD) and additive-increase/additive-decrease (AIAD) do not reach stability.
HighSpeed TCP (HSTCP) is a congestion control algorithm protocol defined in RFC 3649 for Transport Control Protocol (TCP). Standard TCP performs poorly in networks with a large bandwidth-delay product. It is unable to fully utilize available bandwidth. HSTCP makes minor modifications to standard TCP's congestion control mechanism to overcome this limitation.
Bandwidth management is the process of measuring and controlling the communications on a network link, to avoid filling the link to capacity or overfilling the link, which would result in network congestion and poor performance of the network. Bandwidth is described by bit rate and measured in units of bits per second (bit/s) or bytes per second (B/s).
Compound TCP (CTCP) is a Microsoft algorithm that was introduced as part of the Windows Vista and Window Server 2008 TCP stack. It is designed to aggressively adjust the sender's congestion window to optimise TCP for connections with large bandwidth-delay products while trying not to harm fairness. It is also available for Linux, as well as for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 via a hotfix.
The Skype protocol is a proprietary Internet telephony network used by Skype. The protocol's specifications have not been made publicly available by Skype and official applications using the protocol are closed-source.
Karn's algorithm addresses the problem of getting accurate estimates of the round-trip time for messages when using the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) in computer networking. The algorithm, also sometimes termed as the Karn-Partridge algorithm was proposed in a paper by Phil Karn and Craig Partridge in 1987.
Hari Balakrishnan is the Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, and the Co-founder and CTO at Cambridge Mobile Telematics.
Sally Jean Floyd was an American computer scientist known for her work on computer networking. Formerly associated with the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California, she retired in 2009 and died in August 2019. She is best known for her work on Internet congestion control, and was in 2007 one of the top-ten most cited researchers in computer science.
Bufferbloat is a cause of high latency and jitter in packet-switched networks caused by excess buffering of packets. Bufferbloat can also cause packet delay variation, as well as reduce the overall network throughput. When a router or switch is configured to use excessively large buffers, even very high-speed networks can become practically unusable for many interactive applications like voice over IP (VoIP), audio streaming, online gaming, and even ordinary web browsing.
Kathleen Nichols is an American computer scientist and computer networking expert. Nichols is the founder and CEO of Pollere, Inc, a network architecture and performance company based in California, US. Before founding Pollere, Nichols was VP of Network Science at Packet Design, where she was part of the founding team. Prior to Packet Design she was director of advanced Internet architectures in the Office of CTO at Cisco Systems.
Saverio Mascolo is an Italian information engineer, academic and researcher. He is the former Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Science and the professor of Automatic Control at Department of Ingegneria Elettrica e dell'Informazione (DEI) at Politecnico di Bari, Italy.
