| Breakthrough in Internet Protocol offers DR benefits
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 11th. 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 is 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.” Visualisations 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 US 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 less than one second,” Rhee said. The greatest challenge for the new protocol, he added, was to fill the pipe fast without starving out other protocols. “It’s a tough balance,” he said. By allowing the rapid transfer of increasingly large packets of information over long distances, the new protocol would boost the efficacy of many cutting-edge business operations and would make large-scale IP-based disaster recovery a much more practical solution than it is today.
•Date:
16th March 2004 •Region: N.America/World
•Type: Article •Topic:
IT continuity |
