WPI - CS - TR - 05 - 13 July 2005 Making Better Use of All Those TCP ACK Packets

Many TCP connections show an asymmetric traffic pattern where significantly more data is sent in one direction than the other resulting in large numbers of ACK-only packets to be generated. In this work we propose and evaluate two independent approaches for how to make better use of the available space in TCP ACK-only packets to improve data transfer. The first approach provides packet-efficient throughput in the reverse direction of a connection without sacrificing forward throughput, while the second approach provides more detailed and complete information about the state of the forward connection that could be used by a TCP implementation to obtain better throughput under different network conditions.