Block Data Transfer protocol for communication over high-speed long-distance networks

Conventional acknowledgment based retransmission protocol such as TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) has several problems when used over high-speed long-distance networks. In this paper, a new data transfer protocol named BDT (Block Data Transfer) is proposed. It is built on the top of UDP (User Datagram Protocol) with reliability control and congestion control mechanism. In BDT, SLT (Shifted Luby Transfer) codes are used for masking packet loss. Thus the performance of communication is increased. In order to identify the occasional packet loss from packet loss caused by congestion, an evaluation model based on feedback is proposed. We describe the design and implementation of BDT and experimental results show that BDT achieves high bandwidth utilization compared with TCP and UDT.