Evaluating Quick-Start for TCP
Pasi Sarolahti, Mark C. Allman, Sally Floyd · 2005
This paper explores the Quick-Start mechanism, designed to allow transport protocols to explicitly request permission from the routers along a network path to send at a higher rate than normally allowed by traditional congestion control mechanisms. If the routers are underutilized, they may approve the sender's request for a higher sending rate; otherwise the sender uses the default congestion control algorithms. This paper discusses some of the design issues of Quick-Start, and evaluates the potential benefits, costs and implications of Quick-Start in different networking environments. Using simulations, we evaluate several different algorithms that routers could use to process a Quick-Start Request. This evaluation explores tradeoffs between the fraction of Quick-Start requests that are approved and the fraction of approved Quick-Start requests that result in increasing network congestion. In addition, the paper discusses the security implications of using Quick-Start and some possible mitigations for the vulnerabilities.