End-to-end transmission control by modeling uncertainty about the network state
Keith Winstein, Hari Balakrishnan · 2011
This paper argues that the bar for the incorporation of a new subnetwork or link technology in the current Internet is much more than the ability to send minimum-sized IP packets: success requires that TCP perform well over any subnetwork. This requirement imposes a number of additional constraints, some hard to meet because TCP's network model is limited and its overall objective challenging to specify precisely. As a result, network evolution has been hampered and the potential of new subnetwork technologies has not been realized in practice. The poor end-to-end performance of many important subnetworks, such as wide-area cellular networks that zealously hide non-congestive losses and introduce enormous delays as a result, or home broadband networks that suffer from the notorious "bufferbloat" problem, are symptoms of this more general issue.