An Investigation into Transport Protocols and Data Transport ...

10.3. Future Directions 256
research, especially within the framework of fairness implications, in using
AQM solutions.
10.3.3 Implementation of New-TCP Algorithms
Experimental results in Chapter 9 were hampered by the implementation
difficulties related to software and hardware limits of dealing with the flux
of incoming and outgoing packets.
An obvious avenue to pursue is the optimisation of SACK processing
code, and the investigation of the other performance bottlenecks that may
exist within the Linux (and other operating systems) kernels.
An orthogonal approach is to mitigate these problems into dedicated
hardware subsystems as with TCP Offload Engines [Gwe01, SUV03] in order
to lower the burden of dealing with network activity in a similar way to
RAID subsystems for disk activity.
10.3.4 Other Forms of Transport
Due to the various constraints outlined in this dissertation with TCP, several
research groups have investigated into non-TCP (unicast) based transport.
Specifically, due to the constraints of requiring congestion control, most
implementations offer alternative congestion control strategies, but more importantly
offer the solution of using negative acks in order to reduce the
reverse traffic burden by signaling losses rather than successful data receipt.
Such research offers insight as to whether it may be beneficial to completely
replace TCP with an alternative protocol for data replication. However,
as most Internet software relies upon TCP for communication, much
work will need to be done in terms of updating such software.