Study of a transport protocol employing bottleneck probing and token bucket flow control

Abstract

In this paper, we present an experimental transport protocol which employs alternative methods of startup and congestion avoidance to those commonly used in implementations of TCP. Through modelling and simulation, we demonstrate how a packet-pair probe may be used to replace traditional slow-start methods and how pro-active congestion avoidance algorithms provide smoother traffic flow with lower levels of packet loss and retransmission. We also show how a token bucket may be used to allow bounded burstiness for an Internet connection in order to facilitate an application's Quality of Service.