Towards a rate-based TCP protocol for the Web

TCP´s sliding window flow control mechanism often leads to bursty packet traffic in the Internet. In the presence of network congestion, multiple packet losses can occur degrading the performance of TCP and the user-perceived performance of the Web. This paper presents a rate-based pacing (RBP) mechanism for TCP flow control. This mechanism can reduce the burstiness of TCP packet transmission and improve document transfer performance. Simulation is used to evaluate the performance of this mechanism. Our RBP TCP protocol is found to provide similar performance to Reno TCP in terms of throughput and packet loss for bulk data transfers, but lower packet loss and 10-20% lower latency than Reno TCP for Web-like document transfers