Conservative Slow Start: Controlling Losses in Very High Speed Networks

In this paper, we address the problem of how TCP sessions ramp up their transmission windows in a controlled way. We introduce a conservative slow start scheme that reduces to the regular slow start when session path queues are empty, but slows down the control window increase speed as buffers start to build up. We show via event driven simulation and open source based high speed experimental testbed the effectiveness of our conservative slow start mechanism in reducing packet losses and consequent retransmissions.