Enhancing the Flexibility of TCP in Heterogeneous Network

PLoS One. 2016 Sep 22;11(9):e0161249. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0161249. eCollection 2016.

Abstract

Due to a set of constant initial values, the performance of conventional TCP drops significantly encountering heterogeneous network, showing low throughput and unfairness. This paper firstly demonstrates the chaotic character of TCP congestion control in heterogeneous network, especially the sensitivity to initial value. Inspired by merit of nature-inspired algorithm, a novel structure of TCP congestion control (IPPM, Internet Prey-Predator Model) is proposed. Parameters such as available link capacity(C), congestion window (W) and queue length (Q) are collected by IPPM, which calculates the max value of C according to the interacting relationship existing in C, W and Q, and IPPM initiates the TCP ssthresh with the calculated value. Plenty of simulation results show that the modified TCP can effectively avoid network congestion and packet loss. Besides, it holds high resource utilization, convergence speeds, fairness and stability.

Grants and funding

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 61070247, the scientific and technological project of Henan province under Grant No. 132102210246, No.13B510001, No.14A510015, and No.NGII20150311.