Exploring practical limitations of TCP over transatlantic networks

Tomorrow’s large physics and astronomy projects will require to transport tremendous amounts of data over long distances in near real time. Traditional TCP implementations have severe problems in reaching the necessary performance. In the recent past, researchers have shown that TCP implementations can be scaled to achieve multi-gigabit per second speeds over high-bandwidth high-delay networks. The ability of TCP to scale to high speeds opens possibilities for very large data transfers over vast distances. We analyze here whether TCP can fulfill this task and what problems we are faced with. We also examine TCP in the context of dedicated links (Lambdas).