DMCTCP: Desynchronized Multi-Channel TCP for high speed access networks with tiny buffers

Abstract

The past few years have witnessed debate on how to improve link utilization of high-speed tiny-size buffer routers. Widely argued proposals for TCP traffic to realize acceptable link capacities mandate: (i) over-provisioned core link bandwidth; and (ii) non-bursty flows; and (iii) tens of thousands of asynchronous flows. However, in high speed access networks where flows are bursty, sparse and synchronous, TCP traffic suffer severely from routers with tiny buffers. We propose a new congestion control algorithm called Desyn-chronized Multi-Channel TCP (DMCTCP) that creates a flow with multiple channels. It avoids TCP loss synchronization by desynchronizing channels, and it avoids sending rate penalties from burst losses. Over a 10 Gb/s large delay network ruled by routers with only a few dozen packets of buffers, our results show that bottleneck link utilization can reach 80% with only 100 flows. Our study is a new step towards the deployment of optical packet switching networks.