CapStart: A Path Capacity Adaptive TCP Slow Start for High Speed Networks

Abstract—In this document, we introduce CapStart TCP, an adaptive Slow Start scheme that consistently achieves fast TCP file transfer times regardless of high speed network scenario. Once the TCP session is established, we estimate TCP session path capacity scenario, and tune the transport protocol to deliver fast transfer times. We show that our capacity estimator works well even when the session is subjected to commercial Internet cross traffic. We demonstrate significant transaction performance improvements of CapStart TCP, of as much as three times faster completion times in transcontinental high speed network experiments for various capacity scenarios.