QUIC is increasingly being deployed on the Internet as an alternative to TCP. However, QUIC over satellite links faces particular challenges as high and variable round-trip times (RTTs) make it difficult to determine and then reach link capacity. Standard slow start algorithms to detect link capacity can perform poorly over satellite links, often exiting slow start too early and limiting throughput or exiting too late and causing unnecessary packet loss. The Slow start Exit At Right CHokepoint (SEARCH) algorithm aims to exit slow start after reaching link capacity but before incurring packet loss by tracking delivery rates and exiting when rates have not increased by the expected amount. SEARCH has shown benefits over traditional slow start for TCP connections but has yet to be implemented and evaluated in QUIC. This paper presents the design and implementation of SEARCH in an open-source QUIC library, with the code publicly available as a contribution. Evaluation of SEARCH over a geostationary satellite link show SEARCH successfully exits slow start before loss in the majority of cases, improving goodput compared to the baseline.

Materials:

• Paper: pdf
• Slides: pdf, pptx

More information:

See also:

• Maryam Ataei Kachooei, Joshua Chung, Amber Cronin, Benjamin Peters, Feng Li, Jae Won Chung, and Mark Claypool. Implementation of the SEARCH Slow Start Algorithm in the Linux Kernel, In Proceedings of the 0x18 NetDev Conference, Santa Clara, California, USA, July 2024. Online at: http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/papers/search-netdev-24/

• Maryam Ataei Kachooei, Jae Chung, Feng Li, Benjamin Peters, Josh Chung, and Mark Claypool. Improving TCP Slow Start Performance in Wireless Networks with SEARCH, In Proceedings of the IEEE World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (WoWMoM), Perth, Australia, June 2024. https://web.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/papers/search-wowmom-24/

• Pinhan Zhao, Benjamin Peters, Jae Won Chung, and Mark Claypool. Competing TCP Congestion Control Algorithms over a Satellite Network, In Proceedings of the IEEE Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC), Virtual Conference, January 8-11, 2022. Online at: http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/papers/tcp-compete-22/

• Benjamin Peters, Pinhan Zhao, Jae Won Chung, and Mark Claypool. TCP HyStart Performance over a Satellite Network, In Proceedings of the 0x15 NetDev Conference, Virtual Conference, July 2021. Online at: http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/papers/tcp-hystart-netdev-21/

• Saahil Claypool, Jae Chung, and Mark Claypool. Comparison of TCP Congestion Control Performance over a Satellite Network, In Proceedings of the Passive and Active Measurement Conference (PAM), Virtual Conference, March 29-31, 2021. Online at: http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/papers/tcp-sat-pam-21/