Optimization of a TCP connection

Abstract

In the preferred embodiments, it is first determined whether or not a TCP connection from a sending device to a receiving device in the wireless communications network is in a slow start phase. If the TCP connection is in a slow start phase, then the data to be sent in the TCP connection that is allocated a priority that is higher than the priority allocated to other data to be sent by the sending device. The sending device may be a Serving GPRS Support Node (SGSN), a device in a Radio Access Network (RAN) or other network device, and the method of the preferred embodiments may be implemented by software installed and executed on the network device.

Description

FIELD OF THE INVENTION [0001] The invention relates to data transmission in a wireless and / or wireline communications network. In particular, the invention relates to improvements in the throughput of a TCP connection in a wireless network and / or wireline network where data buffers re maintained. BACKGROUND OF THE RELATED ART [0002] The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is the predominant transfer layer protocol used in Internet Protocol (IP) data transmissions. A sending device utilizing TCP retransmits data unless it receives an acknowledgment from the receiving device that the data successfully arrived at the receiving device. TCP also utilizes a handshake to establish the logical end-to-end connection between the communicating devices and views data as a continuous stream. It therefore maintains the sequence in which bytes / octets are sent and received to facilitate this byte-stream characteristic. [0003] TCP uses a slow start process whenever a connection is started or a timeo...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0006] Briefly, and in general terms, the preferred and exemplary embodiments of the invention resolve the above and other problems in the slow start phase time for the TCP connection in a wireless network. In a first aspect of the preferred embodiments, it is first determined whether or not a TCP connection from a sending device to a receiving device in the wireless communications network is in a slow start phase. If the TCP connection is in a slow start phase, then allocating priority in the sending device to the data to be sent in the TCP connection that is higher than the priority allocated to other data to be sent by the sending device. The sending device may be a Serving GPRS Support Node (SGSN), a device in a Radio Access Network (RAN) or other network device, and the method of the preferred embodiments may be implemented by software installed and executed on the network device.

Problems solved by technology

Also, the bandwidth in the wireless network is limited and this limited bandwidth is shared among multiple users, and a high bit error rate (or even a lost connection in some circumstances), resulting in a long round trip time (RTT) for the connection (or even timeouts) that require the slow start process to begin again.

This means that the rate at which acknowledgement messages are received is very slow.

This means that the RTT during slow start has a strong component of the queuing delay coming from other connections.

However, after the slow start phase if the TCP connection has to face the real network conditions (queuing delay, etc) the benefits of expedited slow start are lost and the performance of the connection may not be as good as it is expected to be.

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