An Investigation into Transport Protocols and Data Transport ...

10.3. Future Directions 253
low overhead rates and is therefore recommended for dedicated circuits when
there is no other traffic.
FAST and H-TCP are recommended for use on dedicated circuits for regardless
of whether it is a shared circuit or solely dedicated. Their advantage
lies in the ability to maintain high throughput, yet being fair and facilitating
fast convergence times between competing flows.
10.3 Future Directions
It is expected that many new TCP congestion control algorithms will come
to light both from the natural evolution of the existing New-TCP algorithms
and from future designs and ideas. A natural question arises from this: would
future networks impose a homogenous or heterogeneous mix of these algorithms?
Whilst it is not within the scope of this dissertation to answer this
question, it is worth noting that the work in Chapter 7 sets a foundation from
which comparative testing has been identified as important in being able to
understand and evolve congestion control algorithms. It should therefore be
important to be able to expand upon these ideas in to a consistent framework
from which disparate research groups can effectively contribute to a common
shared goal. More importantly it will enable the focus of effort in order to
evolve the more promising algorithms.
The expansion of this work is summarised in the following sections.
10.3.1 New-TCP Algorithms
The research conducted in this dissertation suggests that the algorithmic
implementation of H-TCP has certain advantages; in particular the polyno-