High performance wide area data transfers over high performance networks

This paper introduces a new user-level communication protocol designed to provide high-performance data transfers across high-bandwidth, high-delay, networks. The protocol incorporates the most important enhancements defined by the networking community to improve the performance to TCP for this environment, and also defines enhancements unique to this protocol. In terms of the so-called "Large Window" extensions to TCP, this protocol implements a communication window that is essentially infinite, and provides a selective acknowledgement window that spans the entire data transfer. In terms of user-level extensions to TCP, it implements a user-defined acknowledgement frequency, a user-defined "batch sending" window, and a simple framework within which the user can define the algorithm that determines the next data packet to be sent out across all eligible packets. We present experimental results demonstrating data throughput on the order of 85%-92% of the maximum available bandwidth across both short haul and long haul high-performance networks.