SABUL: A High Performance Data Transfer Protocol

The paper describes SABUL, an application level data transfer protocol for data intensive applications over high bandwidth-delay product networks. SABUL is designed for reliability, high performance, fairness, and stability. This unidirectional protocol uses UDP to transfer data and TCP to send back control messages. A rate based congestion control that tunes the inter-packet transmission time helps achieve both efficiency and fairness. To remove the fairness bias between flows with different network delays, SABUL adjusts its rate control at uniform intervals, instead of at intervals determined by round trip time. The protocol has demonstrated its efficiency and fairness features in both experiments and practical applications. Index Terms -SABUL, transport protocol, rate control, bandwidth-delay product, high performance data transport