DSLTech
join:2000-12-30
San Jose, CA
| The way TCP works now is not optimal, since it was designed long ago on networks that were rather buggy and full of errors.
These days there are at least 3 points during network movement that a packet/frame/message is verified for errors or missing/out-of-order items.
What I understand of Fast TCP is that the only changes will be made at the Transport layer. What layers do routers, switches, etc work at? Well, Network(below TCP), Data-link (below Network) and wire. No changes will need to be made do these devices, only perhaps some changes to the far end systems at the sockets level or something. Software upgrades to end-systems and servers, and the programs/drivers that interface with them.
I dont see there being a huge upgrade in speed, however. If you take a look at the speed tests on this website, you'll notice a fat amount is "overhead". Instead of using UDP for streaming, we could use Fast TCP, and have a "reliable" transmission. Instead of sacrificing 15 to 30% for overhead, we could utilize that for actual data, and maybe only have 5% overhead.
Remember that all that "overhead" also includes lots of data that your system sends back to the other system to acknowledge receipt. If you have a program like UD Meter, you'll see when you dload a 100MB file, you've SENT them probably 5MB of acks and stuff.. actually i dont know the details on that but it uses your UPload bandwidth. And these days most upload bandwidth is pretty small. |
