An effective approach to alleviating the challenges of transmission control protocol

The transmission control protocol (TCP) has contributed to the tremendous success of the Internet but it also faces many challenges which are becoming more and more significant as the network grows. Although numerous congestion control algorithms have been proposed to improve the performance of TCP in heterogeneous networks, designing a congestion control algorithm that could achieve high utilisation, ensure fairness and maintain stability remains a great challenge. A novel congestion control algorithm named fair TCP (FTCP) has been proposed to mitigate these challenges. FTCP mitigates these challenges through the following strategies: First, increase the round trip time (RTT)-fairness by altering TCP´s initial congestion control window (cwnd) and adjusting the cwnd´s growth rate to make FTCP flows with different RTTs achieve the same throughput. Secondly, balance the transmission efficiency and TCP-friendliness by dynamically adjusting the aggressiveness of FTCP according to the congestion level of the link. Preliminary experimental evaluations verify that FTCP has obvious advantages in transmission efficiency, RTT-fairness and TCP-friendliness comparing to the state-of-the-art congestion control algorithms.