TCP Smart-Framing: Using smart segments to enhance the performance of TCP

In this paper we propose an enhancement to the TCP protocol, called TCP Smart-Framing(TCP-SF), that enables the Fast Recovery algorithm for short lived flows, as most of the current Internet traffic is. Without modifying the TCP congestion control based on the additive-increase/multiplicative-decrease paradigm, TCP Smart-Framing adopts a novel segmentation algorithm: while classic TCP starts sending one segment, a TCP-SF source is allowed to send an initial window of 4 smaller segments, whose aggregate payload is equal to the connection's MSS. This key idea can be implemented on top of any TCP flavor, from Tahoe to SACK, and requires modifications to the server behavior only. Simulation results, as well as testbed implementation measurements show that TCP Smart-Framing sources are able to outperform classic TCP in terms of completion time.