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BIC-TCP 6,000 Times Quicker Than DSL
Posted by
timothy
on Mon Mar 15, 2004 06:50 PM
from the free-dinner-at-red-lobster dept.
from the free-dinner-at-red-lobster dept.
An anonymous reader writes "North Carolina researchers have developed an Internet protocol, subsequently tested and affirmed by Stanford, that hums along at speeds roughly 6,000 times that of DSL. The system, called BIC-TCP, beat out competing protocols from Caltech, University College London and others. The results were announced at IEEE's annual communications confab in Hong Kong." Update: 03/16 04:46 GMT by T : ScienceBlog suggests this alternate link while their site is down.
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Time to Implimentation? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Time to Implimentation? (Score:5, Funny)
As we all know, pr0n drives the technology bubble. Indicate that the average luser could watch internet pr0n real time over a 56K modem and it's just a matter of time.
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It already IS implemented. (Score:5, Informative)
It already IS implemented.
Or do you mean a large-scale "rollout"?
If so, why bother? Unless you have a REALLY fat pipe and need to use it all for one stream, of course. (But not many need to do that, and the ones that do can now install it on both end points.)
The phrasing of the article is leading to confusion. This is about a PROTOCOL, not about the UNDERLYING TRANSPORT.
The TCP protocol, with its windows, handshaking turnarounds, and timeouts, imposes its own limit on the speed of the data transfer through it. For decades the limit imposed by TCP was so far above the limits imposed by the data rates of the underlying transport that it wasn't a major issue.
But now some people are starting to have REALLY fast pipes. And for them TCP is becoming the limiting factor.
So now reasearchers have come up with a tweaked version of TCP that won't hit the wall until the pipe is a LOT faster than what YOU can rent from your ISP. (Unless you're renting an OC-192, in which you might be starting to fall a little short of its capacity. But if you've got OC-48 or below you're fine.)
When you CAN rent something over 6 Gbps, and you want to routinely use it all for a single TCP connection to get a REALLY FAST fast download, you might want to ask the nice professors for a THIRD generation TCP. B-)
Meanwhile, if you're on an ordianry connection you're not going to increase your data rate by a factor of 6,000 by switching protocols. You might get a little bit closer to the line rate with this SECOND generation TCP. But that's it.
Expect to see this start to gradually start showing up in protocol stacks as an option - automatically configured if both ends know about it and the inventors have come up with a backward-compatible negotiation. That way you'll be able to make better use of fat pipes when you can finally get them.
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Re:It already IS implemented. (Score:5, Funny)
According to an email I received today they are already available and no prescription is required.
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Re:Time to Implimentation? (Score:5, Informative)
Researchers in North Carolina State University's Department of Computer Science have developed a new data transfer protocol for the Internet that makes today's high-speed Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) connections seem lethargic.
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Protocol faster than DSL? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Protocol faster than DSL? (Score:5, Insightful)
Neat stuff, stupid stupid article.
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Re:Protocol faster than DSL? (Score:5, Informative)
What is BIC trying to fix? It certainly isn't "the internet" as most links, on average, run at a fraction of their available bandwidth. TCP can fill up more bandwidth than most people can aford. It looks like the researchers with these insane connections and even more insane data sets want the holy grail of zero protocol overhead and none of the inherent throttling. (TCP limits the number of packets it will transmit before pausing for an ack. As a result, a single TCP connection usually will not consume a gigE link -- 4 connections certainly can.)
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Re:Protocol faster than DSL? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Protocol faster than DSL? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Protocol faster than DSL? (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, maybe you'll be able to out run the fire in your gas tank.
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Re:Protocol faster than DSL? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or like saying they've invented a vehicle that goes faster than a NASCAR racetrack.
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Re:Protocol faster than DSL? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Protocol faster than DSL? (Score:5, Funny)
Sure it will... provided you're not more than three feet from the central office.
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Re:Protocol faster than DSL? (Score:5, Funny)
in other news AMD has developed a new architecture 80 billion times faster than grapefruit
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Re:Protocol faster than DSL? (Score:5, Funny)
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Warrent some (lots of) explanation (Score:5, Informative)
It's a stupid comparison, but I guess they expect people to not have an idea what 9Gb/S is...
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Re:Warrent some (lots of) explanation (Score:5, Informative)
6000 times that is 2400MB/s
This is faster that conventional RAM. A PC would not be able to accept the data at that speed fast enough to store it in RAM!
The headline is obviously sensationalism.
There exist fast optical cariers but they serve purposes that are very different to what DSL lines are meant to be. These are the kind of line that connects cities together and are not to be compared to DSL.
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Re:Warrent some (lots of) explanation (Score:5, Informative)
However, adjusting the MTU has little to do with speed, as the Window Size (how much data can be transmitted before being acknowledged by the far end) is specified in number of bytes (in TCP). I suppose it could have some effect on speed, as when you send a packet that exceeds the MTU, it gets "segmented" into multiple IP packets, each with its own packet header overhead (and if any get lost, the whole bunch have to get retransmitted).
What this new protocol deals with, however, is dynamically varying the window-size. Current TCP does that, but apparently not in as efficient a manner as this.
So all this "x thousand times faster than DSL" is just complete bullshit. You'll never get any faster speeds than the slowest link between point A and point B. This new protocol simply tries to use the Y/bits-per-second available more efficiently. And you won't notice the inefficiency of the current TCP at speeds most DSL/cable/dialup users have available.
Some tech journalists are just idiots.
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Re:Protocol faster than DSL? (Score:5, Insightful)
Dr. Rhee [ncsu.edu], who made that comparison, also made another factual error: "TCP was originally designed in the 1980s when Internet speeds were much slower and bandwidths much smaller" -- Tcp was actually invented in 1974. [about.com] Not that major, but you wouldn't expect a guy who "has been researching network congestion solutions for at least a decade" to miss the mark by so much.
Hopefully the reporter was confused, but since it was a press release, you'd think that it would have had time to go through some review.
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Re:Protocol faster than DSL? (Score:5, Interesting)
Much algorithmic change has happened between the days of the 56k APRANET and multi-gigabit networks also using IP. Van Jacobsen's slow start and other ways of working out tradeoffs on bandwidth/delay vs. window size have been fiddled with for years, and arguably TCP as we know it is too compromised by history to work well as high speeds -- at least, that's what Rhee's comment suggests.
This is really relevant stuff, not to be dismissed by wannabees.
-dB
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oops (Score:4, Funny)
Looks like the server just got Slashdotter 6,000 times faster than normal.
New Protocol???!!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Propagation delays (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Propagation delays (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Propagation delays (Score:5, Informative)
Speed-of-light is 186,000,000 meters per second - from (Cincinnatti) Ohio to Minneapolis is roughly 1600km by highway, which would leave you with a wire-speed delay of only 16ms round-trip.
The extra 34ms you get on a well routed network generally tends to be time spent getting passed through intermediate routers along the way. Each router *does* add a noticeable amount of delay all of its own, apart from wire delay.
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Re:Propagation delays (Score:5, Funny)
40 Megasiemens? Don't you also need to know the capacitance and inductance of the connection in order to figure out the ping time from that?
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hmm (Score:5, Interesting)
"What takes TCP two hours to determine, BIC can do in less than one second,"
Which looks to me like it can figure out the maximum bandwidth of a channel in a fraction of the time it generally takes TCP to do it, so as soon as you start transmitting at 100mbit you are using the entire pipe. Sure, its 6000 times faster than DSL but its not when it is used over the same DSL pipe. This is for getting data accross faster when you have massive bandwidth, not for bringing broadband into homes.
ob. simpsons ref. (Score:5, Funny)
Marge: Who would need that much porn
Homer: [drools]...oohhh..1 million times faster..
Great measurement (Score:4, Funny)
I want it in LOC/sec.
Tim
mirror (Score:5, Informative)
New protocol could speed Internet significantly
Posted on Monday, March 15 @ 14:04:08 EST by bjs
Researchers in North Carolina have developed a data transfer protocol for the Internet that makes today's high-speed Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) connections seem lethargic. The protocol is named BIC-TCP, which stands for Binary Increase Congestion Transmission Control Protocol. In a recent comparative study run by the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), BIC consistently topped the rankings in a set of experiments that determined its stability, scalability and fairness in comparison with other protocols. The study tested six other protocols developed by researchers from schools around the world, including the California Institute of Technology and the University College of London. BIC can reportedly achieve speeds roughly 6,000 times that of DSL and 150,000 times that of current modems.
From North Carolina State University:
NC State Scientists Develop Breakthrough Internet Protocol
Researchers in North Carolina State University's Department of Computer Science have developed a new data transfer protocol for the Internet that makes today's high-speed Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) connections seem lethargic.
The protocol is named BIC-TCP, which stands for Binary Increase Congestion Transmission Control Protocol. In a recent comparative study run by the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), BIC consistently topped the rankings in a set of experiments that determined its stability, scalability and fairness in comparison with other protocols. The study tested six other protocols developed by researchers from schools around the world, including the California Institute of Technology and the University College of London.
Dr. Injong Rhee, associate professor of computer science, said BIC can achieve speeds roughly 6,000 times that of DSL and 150,000 times that of current modems. While this might translate into music downloads in the blink of an eye, the true value of such a super-powered protocol is a real eye-opener.
Rhee and NC State colleagues Dr. Khaled Harfoush, assistant professor of computer science, and Lisong Xu, postdoctoral student, presented a paper on their findings in Hong Kong at Infocom 2004, the 23rd meeting of the Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Communications Society, on Thursday, March 11.
Many national and international computing labs are now involved in large-scale scientific studies of nuclear and high-energy physics, astronomy, geology and meteorology. Typically, Rhee said, "Data are collected at a remote location and need to be shipped to labs where scientists can perform analyses and create high-performance visualizations of the data." Visualizations might include satellite images or climate models used in weather predictions. Receiving the data and sharing the results can lead to massive congestion of current networks, even on the newest wide-area high-speed networks such as ESNet (Energy Sciences Network), which was created by the U.S. Department of Energy specifically for these types of scientific collaborations.
The problem, Rhee said, is the inherent limitations of regular TCP. "TCP was originally designed in the 1980s when Internet speeds were much slower and bandwidths much smaller," he said. "Now we are trying to apply it to networks that have several orders of magnitude more available bandwidth." Essentially, we're using an eyedropper to fill a water main. BIC, on the other hand, would open the floodgate.
Along with postdoctoral student Xu, Rhee has been working on developing BIC for the past year, although Rhee said he has been researching network congestion solutions for at least a decade. The key to BIC's speed is that it uses a binary search approach - a fairly common way to search databases - that allows for rapid detection of maximum network capacities with minimal loss of information. "What takes TCP two hours to determine, BIC can do in les
Summary: BIC-TCP is an efficient TCP successor (Score:5, Informative)
To quote the part that says what the article is actually about:
Re:Summary: BIC-TCP is an efficient TCP successor (Score:5, Insightful)
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Apples and Oranges? (Score:5, Insightful)
The article is /.'d so I can't figure out wht this means - what transmission media/hardware are they using? I can make plain old TCP/IP 600,000 times faster than "DSL speeds" if I have hardware that meets that specification.
DSL speed vs IP speed (Score:5, Insightful)
The question I'd love to ask the authors would be "so, what happens when I run BIC-TCP over a DSL modem? Does it suddenly become 6000 times faster?" I don't think so.
Connections are still going to be constrained by the underlying link speed, and the internet will not become thousands of times faster overnight because of this.
Sure, BIC-TCP looks like it's more efficient than TCP and that's a good thing, but the gains this protocol provides over TCP are in scalability when using suitably big links.
Yeah but... (Score:5, Funny)
And so... (Score:5, Funny)
In other news.. (Score:5, Funny)
Please send lots of money in the form of grants to
super inventor guy
123 fake street
v3n3r9
Gigabit Ethernet? (Score:4, Funny)
They left out a word (Score:5, Funny)
Let's slashdot the researchers site too (Score:5, Informative)
High-speed networks with large delays present a unique environment where TCP may have a problem utilizing the full bandwidth. Several congestion control proposals have been suggested to remedy this problem. In these protocols, mainly two properties have been considered important: TCP friendliness and bandwidth scalability. That is, a protocol should not take away too much bandwidth from TCP while fully utilizing the full bandwidth of high-speed networks. We presents another important constraint, namely, RTT (round trip time) unfairness where competing flows with different RTTs may consume vastly unfair bandwidth shares. Existing schemes have a severe RTT unfairness problem because the window increase rate gets larger as window grows - ironically the very reason that makes them more scalable. The problem occurs distinctly with drop tail routers where packet loss can be highly synchronized. Bic-TCP is a new protocol that ensures a linear RTT fairness under large windows while offering both scalability and bounded TCP-friendliness. The protocol combines two schemes called additive increase and binary search increase. When the congestion window is large, additive increase with a large increment ensures linear RTT fairness as well as good scalability. Under small congestion windows, binary search increase is designed to provide TCP friendliness.
So What.... (Score:5, Funny)
(fine print: super human strength required, in order to reach maximum speed alterations of the laws of physics may be necessary.)
Mike's oversimplified take on things. (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's a super-simplified version of the problem they're trying to solve: Imagine you have a 3Mbps link to your ISP, as do 49 of your neighbors. However, your ISP has a 45Mbps T3 link to the outside internet. What happens when everybody on your ISP trys to download the Half-Life 2 demo at the same time, creating a need for for 150 Mbps at the ISP uplink? This is called congestion.
There are various solutions that you can use for congestion avoidance; you may have heard of TCP Vegas and Reno [psu.edu] (I'm linking to the PDF document, because it contains a lot of math. This should also be a signal to you about how ridiculously siplified my explanation above is). Obviously, when there is congestion, somebody's got to wait, but determining who and how is not as easy as it might seem.
The new part of the problem is: today's fast networks have very different bandwidth and latency ratios to the networks of even five years ago. Vegas and Reno congestion avoidance algorithms don't work as well as they used to under these conditions. This paper presents a solution that does work well on today's high-speed networks. (Maybe somebody with more expertise could pipe in here with a discussion of "why the existing mechanisms don't work well, and how the new solutions address the problem"?)
I believe slashdot has already covered FAST [caltech.edu], which I believe is a different solution to the same problems.
timothygate, a dark day for 'geeks' (Score:5, Funny)
A mistake of this magnitude really calls for the removal of ALL of his geek-points, immediate surrender of any ssh keys, termination of all accounts on any non-windows machines, immediate discontinuation of WEP encryption, reversion to SSID "netgear", and unrestricted enablement of "File & Printer Sharing".
Unless he can demonstrate how a Honda can get more people somewhere than then the highway they now use... Well actually more like the license plate and turn signals on a honda but I'll let him off easy :)
Clarification (Score:5, Insightful)
In order for TCP to increase its window for full utilization of 10Gbps with 1500-byte packets, it requires over 83,333 RTTs [round trip times]. With 100ms RTT, it takes approximately 1.5 hours...
If I understand correctly, they are not making the inherent speed faster, they are just making the protocol able to understand the nature of the bandwidth more quickly, thus improving its ability to efficiently utilize the bandwidth. Thus, instead of requiring 1.5 hours to ramp up, theirs might take a few seconds or minutes.
My guess is that you aren't going to see huge gains from this for the average person; you'd need scads and scads of bandwidth in order to really need something like this -- TCP doesn't have any problem saturating a small 56kbps.
Summary of Paper (Score:5, Informative)
If you have a fat pipe, say 1 to 10GB/s, standard TCP will not fully utilize the bandwidth because the congestion control algorithm throttles the rate. As packets move and there are no errors, the rate increases, but not nearly fast enough. In particular, it takes 1.5 hours of error-free data transfer to reach full capacity, and a single error will cut the connection's bandwidth in half.
BIC-TCP uses a different algorithm for congestion control that is more effective at these speeds.
End of news flash.
-Hope
Attempt at distilling technical info (Score:5, Interesting)
- It is a transport-layer protocol, such as
TCP, making statements such as
"New protocol could speed Internet significantly"
(the title on the article page) a bit bogus, but "BIC-TCP 6,000 Times Quicker Than DSL" utterly clueless.
- It addresses the problem that TCP connections over low latencies get to adjust their windows faster than their higher-latencies buddies sharing a link, causing the lower latency TCP connection to get more of the bandwidth before the link is filled up (and both TCP's back off due to their congestion window).
- The window size is adjusted using binary search instead of an exponential increase; somehow this makes this new protocol able to adjust its window size to the maximum (representing optimum bandwidth utilisation) faster than regular TCP. Why this is remains puzzling, because both binary search and TCP (which uses a factor of the previous window size) should reach their windows sizes in logarithmic time, as both searches are exponentially fast.
The rest of the article can be summarized as harmless fluff and clueless crud, as far as I'm concerned."What takes TCP two hours to determine, BIC can do in less than one second," Rhee said.
This is very puzzling indeed, the article doesn't back it up in the least.
Quick decription (Score:5, Interesting)
BI-TCP is a new protocol that ensures a linear RTT fairness under large
windows while offering both scalability and bounded TCP-friendliness.
The protocol combines two schemes called additive increase and binary
search increase. When the congestion window is large, additive increase
with a large increment ensures linear RTT fairness as well as good
scalability. Under small congestion windows, binary search increase is
designed to provide TCP friendliness.
My interpretation: This protocol would transfer data more efficiently than TCP/IP's teeny tiny packets and quickly figure out the correct packet size to maximize transfer speed. For similar reasons that a congested ATM network shreds the performance of multiple large TCP/IP data transfers, BI-TCP works better than TCP/IP at higher speeds. If you don't have OC-oh-my-god between your end-points, TCP/IP will continue work fine for you.
Re:please don't do this. (Score:5, Interesting)
The belief of USA based companies that bandwidth is "free" and that 30 second video clips are an acceptable form of advertising really hurts users in other parts of the world.
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Re:Cheap Bandwidth (Score:5, Informative)
Modems that plug into your regular telephone line send a signal over a POTS (Plain-Old Telephone Service) phone line. This signal first goes to your telcos closest routing box, then to your telcos closest branch office. From there it gets routed to wherever your phone call was made to, etc... The technology used to route these signals is limited to a maximum THEORETICAL capacity of less than 64kbps because certain (or all) legs of the telephone network are analogue, not digital. That 'theoretical' rate is based on how much noise a typical telephone call has in it. There is simply no way to pass a denser signal through the line than that, according to our understandings of physics and math.
The only similarity that DSL has to POTS internet connections is that the physical wires to your house are compatible and that (sometimes) the two technologies can be used over a single pair of them. Once the signal of a DSL line gets to its very first junction, it has nothing in common with your phone line any longer. It gets sent to a DSLAM bank at your nearest telco site, then sent into the larger regional DSL network and then finally routed out into the internet at large.
What this means is, basically, is 1) there is a good reason why modem speeds haven't increased at all since 56kbps modems came out -- it's physically impossible for them to go faster. 2) DSL technology is transitory -- It only exists because people currently have wires from their telco already coming into their homes. I predict that slowly, over the next 10 years, we'll see telecommunications turn on its head. Instead of internet service being delivered over phone lines, we will have phone service delivered over internet connections. These lines may take the form of twisted-pair wires as is used in DSL, multiple twisted-pair wire groups as are used in ethernet, coaxial wires currently used in cable-tv/cable-modem service, or fiber-optical cables. The only thing I can guarantee is that they won't be routed through the telephone network before being passed into the internet.
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