Overlay TCP: Ending End-to-End Transport for Higher Throughput
Himabindu Pucha, Y. Charlie Hu · 2005
Recently, overlay routing has emerged as a promising approach to mitigating many problems with Internet routing, such as improving the reliability of Internet paths as well as the throughput via multiple paths. We advocate that as overlay routing is gaining wider acceptance, it is time to investigate TCP performance on top of overlay routing, in particular, the potential of overlay routing for improving the end-to-end TCP throughput. We propose a general-purpose application-level protocol extension to TCP, called Overlay TCP (oTCP), that improves TCP throughput by splitting a TCP connection with a large RTT into pipelined TCP sub-connections with small RTTs via overlay routing.