Extensions of VCP to Enhance the Performance in High BDP and Wireless Networks

While Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is the most popular transport protocol used in terrestrial networks, its performance is not adequate in wireless networks with long delay, e.g., satellite networks. Though some improvements of TCP and new transport protocols have been proposed, the authors focus on Variable-structure congestion Control Protocol (VCP) designed for high Bandwidth Delay Product (BDP) networks. In VCP, Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) is used to generate the feedback signal from routers to sources in order to notify the utilization ratio of a bottleneck link. By adjusting its congestion window according to the network traffic conditions, VCP is able to achieve high link utilization even in high BDP networks.