A Connection-Free Reliable Transport Protocol

The Internet Transport Protocol (ITP) is introduced as an alternative to the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) for reliable end-to-end transport services in the IP Internet. The design of ITP is based on Walden’s early work on host-host protocols, and the use of receiver-driven Interests and manifests advocated in several information-centric networking architectures. The performance of ITP is compared against the performance of TCP using off-the-shelf implementations in the ns3 simulator. The results show that ITP is inherently better than TCP and that end-to-end connections are not needed to provide efficient and reliable data exchange in the IP Internet.