Biblio

Deploying a new network architecture in the Internet requires changing some, but not necessarily all elements between communicating applications. One way to achieve gradual deployment is a proxy or gateway which "translates" between the new architecture and TCP/IP. We present such a proxy, called "Performance Enhancing Proxy for Deploying Network Architectures (PEP-DNA)", which allows TCP/IP applications to benefit from advanced features of a new network architecture without having to be redeveloped. Our proxy is a kernel-based Linux implementation which can be installed wherever a translation needs to occur between a new architecture and TCP/IP domains. We discuss the proxy operation in detail and evaluate its efficiency and performance in a local testbed, demonstrating that it achieves high throughput with low additional latency overhead. In our experiments, we use the Recursive InterNetwork Architecture (RINA) and Information-Centric Networking (ICN) as examples, but our proxy is modular and flexible, and hence enables realistic gradual deployment of any new "clean-slate" approaches.

When multiple TCP connections are used between the same host pair, they often share a common bottleneck – especially when they are encapsulated together, e.g. in VPN scenarios. Then, all connections after the first should not have to guess the right initial value for the congestion window, but rather get the appropriate value from other connections. This allows short flows to complete much faster – but it can also lead to large bursts that cause problems on their own. Prior work used timer-based pacing methods to alleviate this problem; we introduce a new algorithm that ``paces'' packets by instead correctly maintaining the ACK clock, and show its positive impact in combination with a previously presented congestion coupling algorithm.