Exploiting redundancy for timeliness in TCP Boston

Abstract

In a recently completed study, we have unveiled a new transport protocol, TCP Boston, that turns ATM's 53-byte cell-oriented switching architecture into an advantage for TCP/IP. In this paper, we demonstrate the real-time features of TCP Boston that allow communication bandwidth to be traded off for timeliness. We stall with an overview of the protocol, and analytically characterize the dynamic redundancy control features of TCP Boston. Next, we present detailed simulation results that show the superiority TCP Boston compared to other adaptations of TCP/IP over ATMs. Namely, we show that it improves TCP/IP's performance over ATMs for both network-centric metrics (e.g., throughput and percent of missed deadlines) and real-time application-centric metrics (e.g., response time and jitter).