An Investigation into Transport Protocols and Data Transport ...

6.1. Survey of New-TCP Algorithms 111
TCP so that it will deliver and sustain many gigabits per second for scientific
applications.
The requirement for adapting the TCP algorithms, rather than inventing
and deploying a completely new transport protocol are two fold:
• TCP has been proven to be remarkably robust over the evolution of
the internet and has prevented network collapse. It already offers many
facilities that are deemed essential for most data transport applications
such as reliable data delivery, flow control and congestion control.
• It is very likely that TCP will play a continued role as the transport
protocol of choice due to the requirements of web, file and mail delivery
on the Internet. The development of new transport protocols will also
require the phased introduction of new applications to support such
protocols.
This chapter gives an overview of different proposed changes to the TCP
AIMD algorithms to enable high speed transport.
6.1 Survey of New-TCP Algorithms
Several proposals have been made that offer solutions to obtaining high
throughput transport in high-speed and high delay environments. The survey
presented here gives an overview of the many different approaches to enable
higher speed communications through the adaptation of the TCP congestion
control algorithms.
Amongst those, only algorithms that require sender side modifications to
the TCP stack are presented. This is important as it allows compatibility
with existing TCP implementations and would ease deployment.