Variable Reliability Protocol: A protocol with a tunable loss tolerance for high performance over a WAN.
Alexandre Denis, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), 69 - Lyon (France). Lab. de l'Informatique du Parallelisme, Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon, 69 (France). Lab. de l'Informatique du Parallelisme, Lyon-1 Univ., 69 (France). Lab. de l'Informatique du Parallelisme · HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2000
Applications often have to chose between the slow TCP and the unreliable UDP. Robin Kravets from the GaTech has proposed an alternative: the Variable Reliability Protocol (VRP). The applications can specify what the allowable data losses are, and the protocol guarantees that the given loss tolerance parameters are respected. It should result in a faster throughput over WAN which have typically a higher loss rate. In this paper we describe how VRP has been improved, implemented, and integrated into Nexus, the communication library of the meta-computing environment Globus.