The TCP “Adaptive-Selection” Concept

The rapidly increasing importance of wireless communications (including satellite) together with the rapid growth of high speed networks pose new challenges to TCP. To overcome them, a wide variety of TCP enhancements has been presented in literature. However, because most proposals aim to address different impairments, the choice of “the best” TCP enhancement becomes arduous, given the increasing level of heterogeneity of present and future networks. The TCP adaptive-selection concept, introduced by the authors in this paper, aims at providing an alternative approach, by challenging the idea that only one TCP enhancement must be adopted. In fact, by extending the concept that underlies ACM (Adaptive Coding and Modulation) to Transport layer, it envisages concurrent adoption of different TCP versions on the same server, the better to match the different impairments present on different connections. Preliminary results obtained by considering a simple application example are encouraging, and justify the following remarks on feasibility and the discussion of some implementation proposals.