Evolving TCP.
Zubair Nabi, Toby Moncaster, Anil Madhavapeddy, Steven J. Hand, Jon Crowcroft · 2012
Over the last decade TCP has become the de facto "narrow waist" of the Internet -- a one-size-fits-all transport that is poorly suited to the needs of modern applications. As middleboxes have become ubiquitous, it has become nigh impossible for alternative transports to exist and so application developers have come to view opening a TCP socket as the only reliable way to connect to a server. Some recent proposals circumvent this problem by camouflaging new transports so that they appear like TCP to middleboxes. We draw the key lessons from this approach and show how this could lead to a true one-size-fits-all transport: "Polyversal TCP".