Development and Testing of a New Transport Protocol Optimized for Multimedia Internet Transactions.

Abstract

The TCP/IP protocol, which carries over 95% of data across the Internet, was first published in 1974 at a time when packet-switching was a new technology and computer communications were dominated by the virtual-circuit paradigm. Computer networking has changed dramatically in the past quarter-century, but the underpinnings of TCP have remained virtually unchanged. Many of TCP's most significant design assumptions are no longer valid in the modern Internet. As a result, TCP typically exhibits extremely poor performance including congestion, underutilization of bandwidth, and server overload. Despite these facts, and increasing evidence that TCP/IP is not suited to many of the application protocols it supports, only incremental improvements have been widely researched and no viable alternatives have come to prominence. This dissertation proposes a new transport protocol, the Multimedia Transaction Protocol (MTP), which has been created to meet the needs of modern applications operating in a modern network environment. This new protocol has been designed to handle transaction style client-server interactions across an unreliable, highly congested, packet-switched network. Experimental and simulation results show that MTP provides an order of magnitude improvement in throughput while contributing to network stability and greatly reducing latency. This work characterizes the modern transport environment, describes the design and implementation of MTP, and presents initial test results.