ByPass: towards an unified transport protocol for the internet

Abstract

Due to the limitations in the performance of the transmission control protocol (TCP) over wireless networks, multiple variants and alternatives have been proposed and evaluated. In most cases, these protocols are designed for specific type of networks and they perform well in their best case, for example, HOP performs well in mesh networks but would incur unnecessary overhead in wired networks . For supporting these different protocols across the Internet, all hosts need to have implementation of multiple transport protocols running. The application layer can then ask for a specific transport protocol as required. Since the transport layer is typically built in the operating system of most static and mobile communication end points, most protocols cannot be supported on legacy networks. This paper proposes ByPass, a transport layer protocol which alleviates the need for implementing different transport protocols. We present ByPass as an unified transport layer protocol that can switch modes according to variation in the network type to provide steady performance guarantee. For a network with unstable wireless links, it will switch to a hop-by-hop reliable mode and when the links are steady, it will switch to an end-to-end reliable mode. Using the ByPass framework API, application layer can be completely agnostic of the transport approach thus allowing common application code to be written across different types of network.