Few Crucial Things You Need To Know About Transmission Control Protocol Optimization

TCP stands for Transmission Control Protocol which works alongside the Internet Protocol to form the foundation upon which the internet functions as a whole. It is one of the main protocols, or set of rules that make up the Internet Protocol Suite, otherwise known as TCP/IP. Transmission Control Protocol defines how computers send packets of data to each other and do it in a reliable, orderly and error-free way. The biggest internet applications run on it, are WWW, file transfer, email and remote administration. 

What is TCP Optimization?

A TCP optimiser is a set of techniques to get better data transfer on a network connection than the standard TCP is capable of, without modifying other applications. Interestingly, although it is a building block of the internet itself, it is yet to reach its optimal level. Because of poor performances, communication service providers struggle to provide high-quality experiences for subscribers at the cost of expensive resources and dealing with operational inefficiencies.

How to improve TCP Performances

1. The problem may lie more in congestion than bandwidth in case of a TCP optimiser. Ideally, you want to get data from one computer to another quickly, as opposed to the amount of data you transfer. There are individual, non-cooperative senders and receivers constantly trying to cram their data through.

Ramping might help applications in uncongested networks pick up the pace, but increases the chance of congestion with every new sender.

Optimizers that can modify ramping behaviors to slow the initial ramp up or decrease the size of the initial drop down can prevent congestion and preemptively slow down transmissions as new traffic streams begin to ramp up.

2. A Transmission Control Protocol server cannot process the properties of the network through which it is delivering data, hence it is designed in a way that is can understand and learn about the network’s available bandwidth.

This entire process is called the TCP SlowStart. It slowly transmits increasing amounts of data until a certain point, after which it adjusts to match the characteristics of the network.

The solution to optimizing this would be by reducing the time to reach the available bandwidth by splitting the latency between the subscriber network and the internet network.

3. Traffic shaping optimizers try to make sure that an organization has autonomy over the ways in which bandwidth is consumed. Whether the control is good or bad depends on how it is exercised: for users, applications and devices to get bandwidth or limiting that bandwidth that they receive.

Using this concept to optimize TCP traffic would require debate over which applications and users have priority claims during a congestion.

4. When a TCP acceleration solution pre-acknowledges data on the client’s behalf, it helps optimize TCP performance. The faster the server notices the ACKs, the faster the data transmission and the SlowStart phase can be accelerated.

Optimizing performances

Changing demands, shared resources and aggregation layers promote changes in network capacity. This provides an opportunity for improving TCP performance. The server has to pull back if bandwidth decreases and use available bandwidth easily when it increases.