RD-RACE: an improved TCP rate control mechanism in Ethernet

With the rapid development of the Ethernet technique, the rate control mechanism becomes a technical focus in deploying traffic engineering. However, when the bit-rate of TCP exceeds the assigned bandwidth, the packet dropping behavior of the traditional leaky-bucket based rate control algorithm frequently causes retransmission timeout and lowers the throughput of TCP. In order to improve the performance of TCP in the rate-controlled environment, an improved bucket-based rate control algorithm, called RD-RACE (Restricted-Drop RAte Control in Ethernet), is purposed. RD-RACE can reduce the number of packets dropped in the same round of the same TCP flow and increase the throughput of TCP. Simulation shows the algorithm works well.