Ziaul Hossain¹ & Gorry Fairhurst², ¹University of Fraser Valley, Canada, ²University of Aberdeen, UK

Popular Internet applications such as web browsing, web video download or variable-rate voice suffer from standard Transport Control Protocol (TCP) behaviour because their transmission rate and pattern are different from conventional bulk transfer applications. Previous works have analysed the interaction of these applications with the congestion control algorithms in TCP and proposed Congestion Window Validation (CWV) as a solution. However, this method was incomplete and has been shown to present drawbacks. This paper focuses on the ‘newCWV’ which was proposed to address these drawbacks. newCWV depicts a practical mechanism to estimate the available path capacity and suggests a more appropriate congestion control behaviour. These new modifications benefit variable-rate applications that are bursty in nature, with shorter transfer durations. In this paper, this algorithm was implemented in the Linux TCP/IP stack and tested by experiments, where results indicate that, with newCWV, the browsing can get 50% faster in an uncongested network.

Network Protocols, HTTP, TCP, Congestion Control, newCWV, Bursty TCP traffic.