Google wants faster TCP

Google has a few ideas to improve one of the Internet’s foundation technologies: the TCP data transport protocol.

Google is on a mission to speed up the Web. This mission will be of great benefit to them due to their increased presence on the web.

To do this, the most advanced project is SPDY. This communication protocol has the aim of helping HTTP. It transports information around the web, with its aim being to reduce the latency time via multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression.

SPDY support has been added to Google Chrome, with it also being programmable in Firefox version 11. The president of the HTTPbis workgroup (operating within the Internet Engineering Task Force), Mark Nottingham, talks of the work being done with the W3C to offer SPDY support for HTTP 2.0.

Google is interested in going more in depth with the TCP network interconnect, with this data transport protocol being well known for its association with IP. On the Google Code blog, engineer Yuchung Cheng presents some ideas about making TCP faster.

One of these is based on the definition of TCP in the initial congestion window. Yuchung Cheng explains that experiments have demonstrated that by increasing to ten (compared to three currently) the number of packets at the start of a TCP connection, this reduces the latency time by 10%, with this being the time taken for the client to send a request and for the server to return the response.

Among the other ideas is the reduction in the connection timeout from three to one second, the use of a new internally developed protocol named TCP Fast Open and a better algorithm for managing networks congestion (Proportional Rate Reduction for TCP).

All of these developments being made by Google are open source. We will now have to wait and see whether these improvements being made to TCP will be adopted in the long terms…