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BIC-TCP 6,000 Times Quicker Than DSL
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.
Someone needs a clue-bashing with the OSI model. A new internet protocol that's faster than DSL?? So...it negates the use a physical transmission system..or...what?
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 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 protoco
More than enough BS
isn't DSL a hardware technology ( Layer 1 ) whereas a protocol ( TCP, or their invention BIC-TCP) is a layer 3???
Please compare apples with apples and oranges with oranges.
The article makes me laugh, really....
Costin
A new protocol that's 150,000 times the speed of current modems? Uh...I think the reviewer got a little mixed up here. There's the max theoretical speed of the transmission line, and then there's the speed at which the protocol can transmit over that line. While I'm sure it can make modems faster by transmitting more bytes, its not going to make modems 150,000 times faster.
And a ferrari is larger than an orange. WTF is up with this headline? A protocol is faster than a signalling method. Great. To enhance the uselessness, the protocol's speed is measured in multiples of something vague, rather than megabits per second. Nothing turns up for "BIC-TCP" on CiteSeer, so we'll just have to guess until an actual journalist picks up the story.
Am sure we have enough pr0n around to test that ;-)
:-O
So other than all the cool thingys blah blah, imagine what this would do for the future of the pr0n industry!
*gasps*
[insert random lame remark about them apparently not using their shiny new tech cause The Fine Article Has Been Slashdotted here]
I don't get the description of the story. BIC-TCP, a new protocol that is 6000 times quicker than DSL. How can a protocol be quicker than a transport layer? Or is the protocol a new technique that achieves 6000 times the speed over the same infrastructure as DSL?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.