Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

6-2002

Abstract

This paper discusses the application of TCP tunnels on the Internet and how Internet traffic can benefit from the congestion control mechanism of the tunnels. Primarily, we show the TCP tunnels offer TCP-friendly flows protection from TCP-unfriendly traffic. TCP tunnels also reduce the many flows situation on the Internet to that of a few flows. In addition, TCP tunnels eliminate unnecessary packet loss in the core routers of the congested backbones, which waste precious bandwidth leading to congestion collapse due to unresponsive UDP flows. We finally highlight that the use of TCP tunnels can, in principle, help prevent certain forms of congestion collapse described by Floyd and Fall [IEEE/ACM Trans Networking 7 (4) (1999) 458]. The deployment of TCP tunnels on the Internet and the issues involved are also discussed and we conclude that with the recent RFC2309 recommendation of using random early drop as the default packet-drop policy in Internet routers, coupled with the implementation of a pure tunnel environment on backbone networks makes the deployment of TCP tunnels a feasible endeavour worthy of further investigation.

Keywords

TCP tunnels, Aggregation, Quality of service, Congestion collapse, Queue management, Flow back-pressure, Random early drop routers

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

Computer Networks

Volume

39

Issue

2

First Page

207

Last Page

219

ISSN

1389-1286

Identifier

10.1016/s1389-1286(01)00311-5

Publisher

Elsevier

Additional URL

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s1389-1286(01)00311-5

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