TCP slow start begins at a conservative bitrate but quickly ramps up to the available bandwidth. Unfortunately, current TCP implementations can either: 1) exit from slow start prematurely, which is especially detrimental to utilization on satellite links, or 2) exit from slow start too late, causing unnecessary packet loss. We propose a novel technique to exit slow start while avoiding both premature and belated exits. We evaluate our approach over commercial satellite links -- long, fat networks that pose challenges to determining the right slow start exit time. Preliminary results show a high success rate for picking appropriate exit points over satellite links, with potentially being applicable to other types of networks, more generally.

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See also:

• Maryam Ataei Kachooei, Pinhan Zhao, Feng Li, Jae Won Chung, and Mark Claypool. Fixing TCP Slow Start for Slow Fat Links, In Proceedings of the 0x16 NetDev Conference, Lisbon, Portugal, October 2022. Online at: http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/papers/tcp-best-netdev-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/