DMCTCP: Desynchronized Multi-Channel TCP For High Speed Access Networks With Tiny Buffers

The past few years have witnessed debate on how to improve link utilization of high-speed tiny-size buffer routers. Widely argued proposals for TCP traffic to realize acceptable link capacities mandate: (i) over-provisioned core link bandwidth; and (ii) non-bursty flows; and (iii) tens of thousands of asynchronous flows. However, in high-speed access networks where flows are bursty, sparse and synchronous, TCP traffic suffer severely from routers with tiny buffers. We propose a new congestion control algorithm called Desyn-chronized Multi-Channel TCP (DMCTCP) that creates a flow with multiple channels. It avoids TCP loss synchronization by desynchronizing channels, and it avoids sending rate penalties from burst losses. Over a 10 Gb/s large delay network ruled by routers with only a few dozen packets of buffers, our results show that bottleneck link utilization can reach 80% with only 100 flows. Our study is a new step towards the deployment of optical packet switching networks.