RUFC: A flexible framework for reliable UDP with flow control

Various reliable UDP with flow control schemes have been widely adopted to enhance the native UDP protocol. However, all existing schemes exhibit one or more drawbacks that prevent them from achieving the optimal performance in practice. For example, some schemes under-utilize the available bandwidth; some schemes enforce high overhead logic; and some schemes have rigid policies and parameters that do not adapt to ever-changing system runtime and network conditions. In this paper, we propose RUFC, an efficient and flexible framework to support Reliable UDP with Flow Control. Our framework fits between the transport layer employing UDP and the application layer. While providing the common functionalities and interfaces for both layers, RUFC is capable of supporting policy customization and parameter tuning to achieve the optimal application performance. Extensive experimental data shows that RUFC significantly outperforms the native UDP protocol as well as the two state-of-the-art UDP-based protocols (UDT and Tsunami) in terms of throughput and error rate.