Using UDP for Reliable Data Transfer over High Bandwidth-Delay Product Networks

As the network bandwidth and delay increase, TCP becomes inefficient. Data intensive applications over high-speed networks such as the computational grids need new transport protocol to support them. This paper describes a general purpose high performance data transfer protocol as an application level solution. The protocol, named UDT, or UDP-based data transfer protocol, works above UDP with reliability and congestion control mechanisms. UDT uses both positive acknowledgement and negative acknowledgement to guarantee data reliability. It combines rate based and window based congestion control mechanisms to ensure efficiency and fairness, including two particular fairness objectives of TCP friendliness and delay independence. Both simulation and implementation results have shown that UDT meet these objectives very well. This paper will describe the details of UDT protocol with simulation and implementation results and analysis.