TCP, the transmission control protocol, is one of the core protocols governing the Internet. One of TCP’s main functions is to prevent network congestion by regulating the rate at which computers send data.

At the annual conference of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Data Communication this summer, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Center for Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing will present a computer system, dubbed Remy, that automatically generates TCP congestion-control algorithms. In the researchers’ simulations, algorithms produced by Remy significantly outperformed algorithms devised by human engineers.

Remy is a machine-learning system, meaning that it arrives at its output by trying lots of different possibilities, and exploring further variations on those that seem to work best. Users specify certain characteristics of the network, such as whether the bandwidth across links fluctuates or the number of users changes, and by how much. They also provide a “traffic profile” that might describe, say, the percentage of users who are browsing static Web pages or using high-bandwidth applications like videoconferencing.

Finally, the user also specifies the metrics to be used to evaluate network performance. Standard metrics include throughput, which indicates the total amount of data that can be moved through the network in a fixed amount of time, and delay, which indicates the average amount of time it takes one packet of information to travel from sender to receiver. The user can also assign metrics different weights — say, reducing delay is important, but only one-third as important as increasing throughput.

In tests that simulated a high-speed, wired network with consistent transmission rates across physical links, Remy’s algorithms roughly doubled network throughput when compared to Compound TCP and TCP Cubic, while reducing delay by two-thirds. In another set of tests, which simulated Verizon’s cellular data network, the gains were smaller but still significant: a 20 to 30 percent improvement in throughput, and a 25 to 40 percent reduction in delay.

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Also: Learn about an Autonomous Byte Stream Randomizer.


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