A lot of the discussion on tcp-over-satellite recently has concerned
reducing the cost of slow-start, particuarly in the context of HTTP
traffic. Vikram Visweswaraiah and I have a draft paper (currently
submitted for publication) that might be relevant to this issue.
``Improving Restart of Idle TCP Connections'' describes using pacing
(instead of slow-start) to restart the ack clock after a connection
goes idle. The abstract and text (PostScript format) is available at
<http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Visweswaraiah97a.html>.
Although the paper proposes pacing only to restart an idle
connection, it might also be useful to start a new connection if you
somehow knew that you were on a high bw*delay link.
Even without such a mechanism, I think pacing is useful for the
slow-start restart case over satellites.
-John Heidemann
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Feb 14 2000 - 16:14:29 EST