Adaptive FAST TCP

Abstract

FAST TCP is a new transmission control protocol proposed for future high bandwidth-delay product networks. The stability and performance analysis of FAST TCP is an active research area. Researches show that the performance of FAST TCP, such as throughput, packet drop rate, link utilization, is sensitive to the setting of alpha , which is one of the key parameter for FAST TCP. To eliminate the sensitivity, an adaptive FAST TCP algorithm named AFAST TCP is proposed, which can adjust the value of alpha according to the difference between current estimated queuing delay of the buffer in router and the target queuing delay expected by the applications. As a result, the queuing delay can be controlled to a specific value. The analyses and simulation show that AFAST TCP performs better in networks with widely changing conditions and eliminates the dependence of performance on parameter setting effectively.