Reliable transport protocols such as TCP are tuned to perform well in traditional networks where packet losses occur mostly because of congestion. However, networks with wireless and other lossy links also suffer from significant losses due to bit errors and handoffs. TCP responds to all losses by invoking congestion control and avoidance algorithms, resulting in degraded end-to-end performance in wireless and lossy systems. In this paper, we compare several schemes designed to improve the performance of TCP in such networks. We classify these schemes into three broad categories: end-to-end protocols, where loss recovery is performed by the sender; link-layer protocols, that provide local reliability; and split-connection protocols, that break the end-to-end connection into two parts at the base station. We present the results of several experiments performed in both LAN and WAN environments, using throughput and goodput as the metrics for comparison. Our results show that a reliable link-layer protocol that is TCP-aware provides very good performance. Furthermore, it is possible to achieve good performance without splitting the end-to-end connection at the base station. We also demonstrate that selective acknowledgments and explicit loss notifications result in significant performance improvements.

This User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is defined to make available a

This note describes a proposed addition of ECN (Explicit Congestion Notification) to IP. TCP is currently the dominant transport protocol used in the Internet. We begin by describing TCP's use of packet drops as an indication of congestion. Next we argue that with the addition of active queue management (e.g., RED) to the Internet infrastructure, where routers detect congestion before the queue overflows, routers are no longer limited to packet drops as an indication of congestion. Routers could instead set a Congestion Experienced (CE) bit in the packet header of packets from ECN-capable transport protocols. We describe when the CE bit would be set in the routers, and describe what modifications would be needed to TCP to make it ECN-capable. Modifications to other transport protocols (e.g., unreliable unicast or multicast, reliable multicast, other reliable unicast transport protocols) could be considered as those protocols are developed and advance through the standards process. 1. C...

In this paper we present two protocols for asynchronous Byzantine Quorum Systems (BQS) built on top of reliable channels---one for self-verifying data and the other for any data. Our protocols tolerate Byzantine failures with fewer servers than existing solutions by eliminating nonessential work in the write protocol and by using read and write quorums of different sizes. Since engineering a reliable network layer on an unreliable network is difficult, two other possibilities must be explored. The first is to strengthen the model by allowing synchronous networks that use time-outs to identify failed links or machines. We consider running synchronous and asynchronous Byzantine Quorum protocols over synchronous networks and conclude that, surprisingly, "self-timing" asynchronous Byzantine protocols may offer significant advantages for many synchronous networks when network time-outs are long. We show how to extend an existing Byzantine Quorum protocol to eliminate its dependency on reliable networking and to handle message loss and retransmission explicitly.

TCP is a reliable transport protocol tuned to perform well in traditional networks made up of links with low bit-error rates. Networks with higher bit-error rates, such as those with wireless links and mobile hosts, violate many of the assumptions made by TCP, causing degraded end-to-end performance. In tbis paper, we describe the design and implementation of a simple protocol, called the snoop protocol, that improves TCP performance in wireless networks. The protocol modifies network-layer software mainly at a base station and preserves end-to-end TCP semantics. The main idea of the protocol is to cache packets at the base station and perform local retransmissions across the wireless link. We have implemented the snoop protocol on a wireless testbed consisting of IBM ThinkPad laptops and i486 base

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We propose a scheme for congestion avoidance in networks using a connectionless protocol at the network layer. The scheme uses feedback from the network to the users of the network. The interesting challenge for the scheme is to use a minimal amount of feedback (one bit in each packet) from the network to adjust the amount of traffic allowed into the network. The servers in the network detect congestion and set a congestion indication bit on packets flowing in the forward direction. The congestion indication is commu-nicated back to the users through the transport level acknowledgement. The scheme is distributed, adapts to the dynamic state of the network, converges to the optimal operating point, is quite simple to implement, and has low overhead while operational. The scheme also addresses a very important aspect of fairness in the service provided to the various sources utilizing the network. The scheme at-tempts to maintain fairness in service provided to multiple sources. This paper presents the scheme and the analysis that went into the choice of the various decision mechanisms. We also address the performance of the scheme under transient changes in the network and for pathological conditions.

TCP is a reliable transport protocol tuned to perform well in traditional networks where congestion is the primary cause of packet loss. However, networks with wireless links and mobile hosts incur significant losses due to biterrors and handoff. This environment violates many of the assumptions made by TCP, causing degraded end-toend performance. In this paper, we describe the additions and modifications to the standard Internet protocol stack (TCP/IP) to improve end-to-end reliable transport performance in mobile environments. The protocol changes are made to network-layer software at the base station and mobile host, and preserve the end-to-end semantics of TCP. One part of the modifications, called the snoop module, caches packets at the base station and performs local retransmissions across the wireless link to alleviate the problems caused by high bit-error rates. The second part is a routing protocol that enables low-latency handoff to occur with negligible data loss. We have im...

The long-term success of the World Wide Web depends on fast response time. People use the Web to access information from remote sites, but do not like to wait long for their results. The latency of retrieving a Web document depends on several factors such as the network bandwidth, propagation time and the speed of the server and client computers. Although several proposals have been made for reducing this latency, it is difficult to push it to the point where it becomes insignificant. This motivates our work, where we investigate a scheme for reducing the latency perceived by users by predicting and prefetching files that are likely to be requested soon, while the user is browsing through the currently displayed page. In our scheme the server, which gets to see requests from several clients, makes predictions while individual clients initiate prefetching. We evaluate our scheme based on trace-driven simulations of prefetching over both high-bandwidth and low-bandwidth links.

\Not everything that is counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."