Third-Party TCP Rate Control
Dushyant Bansal · UWSpace (University of Waterloo) · 2005
I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. This is a true copy of the thesis, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public. iii The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is the dominant transport protocol in today’s Internet. The original design of TCP left congestion control open to future designers. Short of implementing changes to the TCP stack on the end-nodes themselves, Internet Service Providers have employed several techniques to be able to operate their network equipment efficiently. These techniques amount to shaping traffic to reduce cost and improve overall customer satisfaction. The method that gives maximum control when performing traffic shaping is using an inline traffic shaper. An inline traffic shaper sits in the middle of any flow, allowing packets to pass through it and, with policy-limited freedom, inspects and modifies all packets as it pleases. However, a number of practical issues such as hardware reliability