DCUDP: scalable data transfer for high‐speed long‐distance networks

Abstract

SUMMARYThe emergence of high-speed long-distance networks has promoted the development of various new types of applications that are required to transfer bulk data efficiently. Because of the conservative additive increase and multiplicative decrease strategy, traditional TCP has a severe problem in utilizing bandwidth, which provides an opening for new classes of UDP-based protocols. This paper proposes a high-speed bulk data transfer protocol, Double Cubic UDP (henceforth DCUDP), which is built on top of UDP with rate control and reliability control. DCUDP improves the scalability of the protocol over high bandwidth-delay product networks through cubic-shaped rate control functions and employs a randomized algorithm to alleviate the impacts of continuous loss and loss synchronization. In addition, DCUDP introduces a novel high-precision user-space timer system to facilitate the data transfer. The experimental results demonstrate that DCUDP performs well in terms of bandwidth utilization, CPU utilization, intra-protocol fairness and round-trip time fairness, and exhibits favorable friendliness to standard TCP and high-speed TCP variants.