TCP Africa

An Adaptive and Fair Rapid

Increase Rule for Scalable TCP

Sai Deep 2012CS10223

1

Overview
TCP - Review
Design Considerations for a high speed protocol
Loss Based vs Delay Based TCP
TCP Africa
Experimental Study
Summary
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Transmission Control Protocol

Connection oriented

Three-Way Handshake

Reliable, in-order delivery

ACKs, retransmissions, sequence numbers, checksums

Congestion Control

Reduce transmission rate when congestion occurs

Flow Control

Sender does not overwhelm receiver

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TCP Reno
Most deployed protocol in the Internet
Additive Increase Multiplicative Decrease
Congestion Avoidance Phase (cwnd ssthresh)

On each successful ACK

cwnd cwnd + 1/cwnd

On triple duplicate ACKs

cwnd cwnd/2
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High Speed Scenario

Desired congestion window is quite high

Roughly equal to the BDP of the connection

~83,000 packets for a 10 Gbps link with a 100 ms RTT

Requires a lot of time for window to be regained after a loss

Low utilization even when the network is uncongested

Design Considerations for a high speed protocol

Throughput

Efficient utilization of high available bandwidth

Peer fairness

Fairness between two flows of differing RTTs

TCP-fairness

Should be fair with the older TCP-Reno standard

Congestion collapse

Major concern since they are more aggressive than TCP-Reno

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STCP
Most aggressive of the current well known TCP proposals
Multiplicative Increase Multiplicative Decrease

On each successful ACK

cwnd cwnd + 0.01 * cwnd

On a packet drop

cwnd 0.875 * cwnd

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HSTCP
Scales its drop parameter from 50% at low window sizes to
90% at higher window

On each successful ACK

w w + a(w) / w

On triple duplicate ACKs

w w - b(w) * w

a(w) and b(w) are functions of the current window size

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10

Loss based high speed protocols

Excellent Scalability

Rapid return to the maximum window

At the cost of frequent self induced congestion events

STCP - every 13.4 RTTs (regardless of the link speed)

Both have undesirable fairness properties

Poor RTT bias

Suppress TCP-Reno
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Delay based TCP - FAST TCP

Round trip delay as signal for congestion
Unlikely to cause significant queuing delay
Can quickly converge to equilibrium
Can run in steady state without causing packet drops

Disadvantage

Cant compete with TCP-Reno

Primary reason preventing its widespread adoption

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TCP Africa
Hybrid protocol
Uses a delay metric to determine congestion
Operates in two modes

FAST mode - in the absence of congestion

aggressive congestion avoidance rule of HSTCP

SLOW mode - in the presence of congestion

conservative Reno congestion avoidance rule

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Delay metric
Based on TCP-Vegas

aRTT Exponentially smoothed high accuracy RTT estimate

minRTT minimum delay observed on the path
a constant, usually a real number larger than one
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Algorithm
if ( aRTT minRTT < * aRTT/W)
W = W + fast_increase(W)/W
else
W = W + 1/W
Flows with small RTT do not gain a competitive advantage

Improved RTT bias performance

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Experimental Study
Comparison of the performances of TCP-Africa & HSTCP
parameter set to 1.65

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Safety
Investigate if a protocol hampers the performance of other
flows
1 Gbps
1ms delay

622 Mbps
80ms delay

100 Mbps
1ms delay

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Results
HSTCP had a significant effect on the Reno throughput
Ratio of HSTCP to Reno traffic roughly 25:1
2700 non slow-start packets lost at the bottleneck link
TCP-Africa had a minimal effect on the Reno flow
Ratio of TCP-Africa to TCP-Reno roughly 6:1
Only 47 non slow-start related packets were lost
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Fairness with TCP-Reno

1 Gbps
1ms delay

622 Mbps
80ms delay

1 Gbps
1ms delay
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Results
Ratio of HSTCP to TCP-Reno traffic 17:1
2000 non slow-start packets lost at the bottleneck link
Ratio of TCP-Africa to TCP-Reno roughly 4:1
Only 32 non slow-start related packets were lost

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RTT Bias
Flow from A-B has 30ms RTT
Flow from C-D is set such that its RTT is a multiple of 30ms
HSTCP

Serious fairness problem with flows of different RTT

Short RTT flow quickly dominates the connection

Starves the other flow

TCP-Africa

Flows share the bandwidth proportional to their RTTs

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26

Adapting to network conditions

Study how quickly TCP-Africa can adapt to changing
network conditions
The bottleneck link has a capacity of 622 Mbps
Flow experiencing a minimum RTT of 84 ms
After 160s, a UDP flow at 300 Mbps is started
At 320s, the UDP flow is stopped
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Results
Quickly reduces its bandwidth in response to the UDP flow
As the flow approaches the maximum available bandwidth

Enters slow mode

After the UDP flow terminates

Quickly re-enters high speed mode

Quickly utilizes the newly freed bandwidth

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29

Summary
Maintaining a careful balance between aggressiveness, fairness & safety

A major challenge in developing high speed protocols

TCP-Africa exploits congestion indicators towards fair rapid increase

Not giving in to Reno, yet not crushing it

In the experiments, it achieved

Excellent utilization of bandwidth

Low induced packet loss rate

Excellent fairness properties, RTT bias performance

Overall, a good transfer protocol model

Has the potential to be used in the future

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Thank You