A location information server for the Internet

Congestion is a major Internet problem. TCP accordingly employs congestion avoidance algorithms, which effectively limit the bandwidth available to a connection. Unfortunately, the assumptions against which these algorithms were formulated-low bandwidth, and bulk data transfers-are no longer valid. The combination of increasing bandwidth and short web transfers means that TCP traffic does not obtain a fair share of available bandwidth. Alternative techniques that predict a fairer starting window size for a TCP connection are presented and evaluated. It is further shown that minor modifications to TCP allow these predictions to be used to set start up control variables, and thereby increase the correlation between the bandwidth used by a connection and the level of congestion on its network path. These techniques are based on the use of a location information server (LIS). The design, implementation and evaluation of an LIS is described