ABSTRACT
TCP/IP was primarily designed to support two traffic applications: FTP and Telnet. With the growth of the Internet, network applications and user expectations have changed. Today, with more high-speed users and bursty, interactive Web traffic, greater demand is placed on networks, causing delays and bottlenecks that impact a user’s quality of service. Many of the features that make TCP reliable contribute to performance problems, including:
• Retransmitting when the network “cloud” drops packets or delays acknowledgments
• Backing off when it infers congestion exists (Conventional TCP bandwidth management uses indirect feedback to infer network congestion. TCP increases a connection’s transmission rate until it senses a problem and then it backs off. It interprets dropped packets as a sign of congestion. The goal of TCP is for individual connections to burst on demand to use all available bandwidth, while at the same time reacting conservatively to inferred problems to alleviate congestion.)
TCP uses a sliding-window flow-control mechanism to increase the throughput over wide area networks. It allows the sender to transmit multiple packets before it stops and waits for an acknowledgment. This leads to faster data transfer because the sender does not have to wait for an acknowledgment each time a packet is sent.
