OpenTCP: Combining congestion controls of parallel TCP connections
Safiqul Islam, Michael Welzl, Stein Gjessing, Jianjie You · 2016
Most Internet communication uses the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) at the transport layer. TCP carries out many tasks, including reliability, flow control and congestion control. Congestion control is a mechanism that is concerned with the path between two hosts, but TCP instances operate for separate communicating processes (as identified by port numbers). This means that multiple TCP connections between the same pair of hosts compete on the network. We propose OpenTCP - a method to combine the congestion controls of multiple TCP connections. We report experiments which show that OpenTCP improves the performance of concurrent TCP connections in terms of packet loss and queuing delay. OpenTCP also allows to divide the available bandwidth between the flows according to the needs of the applications.