Motivations

• The widespread use of high-speed networks (1Gb/s, 10Gb/s, etc.) has enabled many new distributed data intensive applications

• Inexpensive fibers and advanced optical networking technologies (e.g., DWDM - Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing)
• 10Gb/s is common in high speed network testbeds, 40 Gb/s is emerging

• Large volumetric datasets

• Satellite weather data
• Astronomy observation
• Network monitoring

• The Internet transport protocol (TCP) does NOT scale well as network bandwidth-delay product (BDP) increases

• New transport protocol is needed!

Notes:

In the past few years, the network bandwidth has been increased rapidly. Five years ago, a 1Gb/s link could be regarded as an extremely fast link, but today, 10Gb/s links have become very common on high speed testbeds, and 40Gb/s links are emerging. The widespread use of high speed networks has enabled many new distributed data intensive applications that were impossible in the past.

Examples of large volumetric datasets involved in these applications include satellite weather data, astronomy observation data, and network monitoring data. In the past these data were usually stored in local storage and then were delivered or processed in a batch mode. Today they can be transferred to a remote site in real time and be processed there.

Unfortunately, existing applications cannot automatically utilize the high speed networks when they move from the traditional Internet with relatively lower speed. TCP significantly underutilizes the bandwidth in high speed long distance networks.

With this background, we need a new transport protocol to support these distributed data intensive applications.