[e2e] TCP 'fast start'

[S. Keshav]

Hi,
    The idea of using environmental variables to optimize TCP start goes
back a while. It is particularly useful for short transfers that complete
before they reach the 'steady-state'. My students and I worked on this in
1999. We used Shared Passive Network Discovery, proposed by Seshan, Stemm,
and Katz to discover connection parameters from a cluster of users to a
popular destination, say, Yahoo, and used this information to choose initial
TCP parameters. Though we only did simulations, our results looked pretty
decent, so maybe Joe, you can actually implement our work :-)

For more details, please see:

 Y. Zhang, L. Qiu, and S. Keshav, "Speeding Up Short Data Transfers: Theory,
Architecture Support, and Simulation Results," Proc. NOSSDAV 2000, Chapel
Hill, NC, June 2000.

http://blizzard.cs.uwaterloo.ca/keshav/home/Papers/data/00/tcpspand_nossdav0
0.pdf

regards

keshav