TERSE: A Unified End-to-End Traffic Control Mechanism to Enable Elastic, Delay Adaptive, and Rate Adaptive Services

This paper puts forward an end-to-end traffic control solution, which we refer to as TCP-Elastic Real-time SErvice (TERSE). TERSE provides a unified end-to-end traffic control protocol that enables Non-Real-time Elastic (NRE) service (i.e., the same as the one under the TCP control), Real-time Delay Adaptive (RDA) service, and Real-time Rate Adaptive (RRA) service. A specific service is enabled by properly setting a single parameter in the protocol. TERSE is underpinned by a sound design methodology. While having its roots in a well-known utility-based optimization approach, this methodology successfully addresses its limitations. It leads to a unified traffic control protocol, which has several provable properties, including fairness, convergence, and stability. The protocol is implemented in LINUX-based systems. The cross-Pacific testing of this protocol shows that it can achieve more than 1.2Mbps throughput performance, 150% higher than TCP-reno and 50% higher than TCP cubic. Both analytical and simulation studies also show that it can provide soft minimum-rate guarantees for both RRA and RDA traffic flows. Moreover, simulation also demonstrates that it is resilient to network resource shortage. As part of the protocol design, an effective utility function of TCP and the corresponding control law are derived, which captures TCP behavior not only in a qualitative but also in a quantitative manner.