TCP-FIT: An improved TCP congestion control algorithm and its performance

The Transport Control Protocol (TCP) has been widely used by wired and wireless Internet applications such as FTP, email and HTTP. Numerous congestion algorithms have been proposed to improve the performance of TCP in various scenarios, especially for high bandwidth-delay product (BDP) and wireless networks. Although different algorithms may achieve different performance improvements under different network conditions, designing a congestion algorithm that performs well across a wide spectrum of network conditions remains a great challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel congestion control algorithm, named TCP-FIT, which could perform gracefully in both wireless and high BDP networks. The algorithm was inspired by parallel TCP, but with the important distinctions that only one TCP connection with one congestion window is established for each TCP session, and that no modifications to other layers (e.g. the application layer) of the end-to-end system need to be made. Extensive experimental results obtained using both network simulators as well as over “live” wired line, WiFi and 3G networks at different geographical locations and at different times of the day are presented. The performance of the algorithm shown in the experiment results is significantly improved as compared to other state-of-the-art algorithms, while maintaining good fairness.