Issues in Designing the Next Generation Transport Protocol

In this paper, we discuss the need for the next generation transport layer. TCP and UDP were designed over 20 years ago. There have been signiicant changes in the Internet since then in terms of size, types of applications, quality of links, technology, and heterogeneity of the network. Several new transport protocols have been proposed in the last two decades. But most of them were designed to handle one class of applications in a speciic network environment. There haven't been many attempts at designing a general purpose protocol like TCP or UDP. Ever since IETF decided the IP Version 6 standard , some researchers have felt the need for next generation transport protocol. In this paper, we take a fresh look at the issues involved for designing a new transport protocol.