Student: Rolf E. Normann ()
Slow Start is an essential part of the TCP protocol. Yet, while a lot of work has gone into understanding its other congestion control phase, Congestion Avoidance, the Slow Start phase is more of an ad-hoc solution without a lot of theory behind it. A finished master thesis has demonstrated with simulations that initially speeding up the slow start phase by letting cwnd grow by more than 1 per ACK is beneficial under a wide variety of environment conditions. However, TCP is an extremely important and widely used protocol, and therefore, changing such an essential part of it requires a very thorough analysis. It is therefore necessary to evaluate the proposed improvement further, above all with real-life tests in addition to some complementary simulations. Such real-life tests should be carried out in this master thesis, by accordingly changing the TCP code in Linux or FreeBSD. A part of this will involve trying to "fool" web servers into opening their window faster.
Program
Informatikk