Many Pacific islands still rely on satellite for Internet access, using narrowband links with capacities far below those of the networks at either end, carrying mostly TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) traffic. On these links, a large number of TCP senders simultaneously try to adjust their congestion windows to the perceived link capacity: Acknowledgment (ACK) packets prompt congestion window increases; overdue ACKs shrink window sizes exponentially.
The long link latency means that senders thus get an extremely outdated picture of the available capacity, often leading to excessive queue oscillation, where the link input buffer overflows and drains entirely within seconds. Complete drainage means idle link capacity, while overflows impede large TCP transfers.
Our experiments in the islands have shown that sending coded packets with redundancy for a small numbers of such transfers can increase goodput by concealing some overflow tail drops. Under our last two ISIF grants, we built a simulator to investigate coding of all flows for such island links.
This showed that coding is extremely time-sensitive: Coded packets must result in ACKs before TCP retransmits, but must also not hit the input buffer during overflows, a common occurrence in our first generation encoder.
Our previous ISIF-funded project added a delay to the coded packets, resulting in more arrivals and increased goodput when the delay happened to coincide with link capacity. This is a hit-and-miss game, however: coded packets may be sent too late and often still hit queue overflows.
Moreover, when surplus coded packets make it into the buffer, they add to the round-trip-time for all other TCP senders with subsequent packets in the queue. The current project leverages a new feature in our coding software, which lets us distinguish coded packets from “original” packets on the wire. We have implemented a queueing system that only feeds coded packets into the “original” buffer once this queue drains below a configured size, and can now also drop surplus coded packets.
Simulations to date show that this leads to a significant increase in goodput on large monopoly flows over the conventional coding, and we are currently investigating how the queueing system parameters must be best chosen to allow this gain to extend to cumulative goodput of a large mix of flows of different sizes, as encountered on such links.
The final technical report is available for review here.
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