Evolution of TCP in High Speed Networks

TCP congestion control protocols have low performances in high speed wide area networks mainly because their slow response with large congestion windows. This TCP behavior has initiated new design phase of alternative protocols that provide improved traffic utilization in high bandwidth delay product networks. The paper presents survey of various high speed sender side congestion control proposals that preserve the fundamental host to host principle. Solutions focus on variety of problems occurring in high speed environment with intention to eliminate congestion collapses and to ensure effective resource utilization. Internet data transfer does not depend only on that how TCP will utilize the network capacity, we have to stress that TCP must cooperate with existing transmitting data protocols through the same network in order to assure fair resource sharing. Part of the paper scope are state of the art high speed TCP proposals, we explore their congestion control techniques, strengths, weaknesses and we try to detect future TCP development possibilities.