Protocol Streamlining

MX-TCP vs. HS-TCP (rfc3649)

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Most terrestrial WANs have a very low natural packet loss rate, normally well under 0.1%, and often under 0.01%. Some enterprises may be dealing with lossy or dirty circuits however, so it is imperative that any WDS solution knows how to deal with both clean and lossy connections.

On 'clean' long fat network (LFN) circuits, features like HS-TCP enable higher bandwidth utilization because they ramp up faster and back off more slowly in the face of any congestion or loss. HS-TCP (High Speed TCP) behaves like regular TCP when dealing with other traffic on the same connection it will back off so all senders can transmit on the link.

On 'lossy' LFN circuits, or on clean LFN circuits where an administrator can guarantee a certain amount of bandwidth, MX-TCP (Maximum Speed TCP) is a better solution. MX-TCP will use 100% of an allocated amount of bandwidth until a transfer has been completed. It will not back off in the face of packet loss, it merely resends any lost packets.