STI: XCP Development

该项目的目的是将TCP拥塞控制方面的重要最新研究成果转化为实用的、经过验证的、可部署的互联网技术。传输技术和用户需求最近和未来的变化正在挑战互联网设计的基本假设，特别是当前的TCP拥塞控制。光纤部署正在飞速发展，增加了网络容量，无线和卫星频道也在激增，增加了往返时间（RTT）。Internet应用程序（包括各种科学和网格网络应用程序）的性能正在受到影响。需要在15分钟内发送拍字节的文件，即每秒超过1千兆比特。从技术上讲，由于TCP拥塞控制，大带宽延迟产品应用程序即使在非拥塞网络中也表现不佳。大型RTT流在与短流竞争时获得不公平的带宽分配，并且TCP已被证明在窗口大小变得非常大时不稳定，导致大带宽振荡。TCP正在修补和调整，但需要一种新的互联网资源管理方法。Dina Katabi [Katabi02]最近开发的XCP拥塞控制机制满足了这一需求。XCP可以以稳定、可扩展的方式利用可用Internet资源的快速变化，并且可以将链路利用率控制与带宽共享策略分离开来。通过这些简单的功能，XCP能够以更快的速度进行网络友好的数据传输，并且抖动更少，几乎没有数据包丢失。这个项目的目标是使XCP成为现实，并展示它的能力和价值。这将包括完整、严格的协议设计和规范，开发高速原型实现，在一系列日益现实的互联网环境中测试和验证XCP，制定迁移计划，并将XCP推向社区接受和标准化。提议者将招募几个科学网络社区作为初始XCP部署的测试环境。最终的XCP部署将花费许多年的时间。该项目将包括近期在研究网络中的部署，并将在启动这项工作中发挥核心作用，并形成一个协作的社区努力来推进XCP。特别是，提案者的工作将催化和利用许多团体的努力，包括研究社区、特定的科学网络用户社区、路由器供应商和IETF。正是这种杠杆作用和协同作用，建立在他们自己适度的技术努力之上，将带来互联网技术的代际变化，这是我们建议的中心目标。

The purpose of this project is to turn important recent research in TCP congestion control into a practical, validated, and deployable Internet technology. Recent and future changes in transmission technologies and user demands are challenging the fundamental assumptions of the Internet's design, especially the current TCP congestion control. Fiber deployment is soaring, increasing network capacity, and wireless and satellite channels are proliferating, driving up round trip times (RTT). Internet applications, including a variety of scientific and Grid networking applications, are suffering in performance. Need exists to send petabyte files in 15 minutes, i.e., at over 1 Gigabit per second. Technically, large bandwidth-delay product applications perform poorly even in un-congested networks because of TCP congestion control. Large RTT flows get unfair allocations of bandwidth when competing against short flows and TCP has been shown to be unstable when window size becomes very large, causing large bandwidth oscillations. TCP is being patched and tweaked, but a new approach to Internet resource management is needed.The XCP congestion control mechanism that was recently developed by Dina Katabi [Katabi02] fills this need. XCP can exploit rapid changes in available Internet resources in a stable, scalable way, and it can separate link utilization control from bandwidth sharing policies. From these simple capabilities, XCP enables network-friendly data transfer at higher speeds with less jitter and almost no packet loss.The goal of this project is to make XCP real and demonstrate its capabilities and value. This will include full, rigorous design and specification of the protocol, developing a high-speed prototype implementation, testing and validating XCP in a series of increasingly real-life Internet environments, developing migration plans, and moving XCP towards community acceptance and standardization. The proposer will enlist several scientific networking communities to serve as test environments for initial XCP deployment.Final XCP deployment will ultimately take many years. This project will include near-term deployment in research networks and will play a central role in getting this work started - - and in forming a collaborative, community effort for advancing XCP. In particular, the proposer work will both catalyze and leverage the efforts of many groups, including the research community, specific scientific network user communities, router vendors, and the IETF. It is this leverage and synergy, building on their own modest technical effort, that will bring about the generational change in Internet technology that is the central objective of our proposal.