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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.
It would be interesting to know how far out an implimentation of such a protocol on a large scale is.
How can a protocol be rated faster than DSL? Shouldn't the rating be against another protocol? Did I miss something in the article?
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Use it to host your blog server..immediately? You've been slashdotted.
This seems misleading. The artical says:
"What takes TCP two hours to determine, BIC can do in less than one second,"
Which looks to me like it can figure out the maximum bandwidth of a channel in a fraction of the time it generally takes TCP to do it, so as soon as you start transmitting at 100mbit you are using the entire pipe. Sure, its 6000 times faster than DSL but its not when it is used over the same DSL pipe. This is for getting data accross faster when you have massive bandwidth, not for bringing broadband into homes.
An awful lot of propagation delay tends to be equipment-internal rather than wire-length. Until you start talking about REALLY long distances like using satellite-based networking, anyway.
Coming soon to Slashdot: meta-meta-moderation!
Slowing down so here it is...
New protocol could speed Internet significantly
Posted on Monday, March 15 @ 14:04:08 EST by bjs
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 les
The article is /.'d so I can't figure out wht this means - what transmission media/hardware are they using? I can make plain old TCP/IP 600,000 times faster than "DSL speeds" if I have hardware that meets that specification.
This article somewhat erroneously compares the speed of "DSL" vs the speed of "BIC-TCP". DSL is a link-layer protocol. BIC-TCP is an network layer protocol. These are different things. See http://www.webopedia.com/quick_ref/OSI_Layers.asp for details.
The question I'd love to ask the authors would be "so, what happens when I run BIC-TCP over a DSL modem? Does it suddenly become 6000 times faster?" I don't think so.
Connections are still going to be constrained by the underlying link speed, and the internet will not become thousands of times faster overnight because of this.
Sure, BIC-TCP looks like it's more efficient than TCP and that's a good thing, but the gains this protocol provides over TCP are in scalability when using suitably big links.
What they mean is that current TCP protocol becomes a bottleneck at high bandwidth applications, so a new protocol is designed that would be efficient up to ~6000xDSL speed (just a pot-shot guess, up to 9Gb/S?). It has nothing to do with pushing data down the POTS line, just that if one day you had a fat pipe to your house, this new protocol would make use of it properly unlike today's TCP.
It's a stupid comparison, but I guess they expect people to not have an idea what 9Gb/S is...
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Does it beat out AOL 9.0 Topspeed technology?
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Is second this notion. Here in Australia users on broadband have volume caps beyond which they have to pay for data at rather high rates, or suffer from their connections being cut back to the equivilent of a 28.8 Modem (depending on your ISP)
The belief of USA based companies that bandwidth is "free" and that 30 second video clips are an acceptable form of advertising really hurts users in other parts of the world.
Speed-of-light is 186,000,000 meters per second - from (Cincinnatti) Ohio to Minneapolis is roughly 1600km by highway, which would leave you with a wire-speed delay of only 16ms round-trip.
The extra 34ms you get on a well routed network generally tends to be time spent getting passed through intermediate routers along the way. Each router *does* add a noticeable amount of delay all of its own, apart from wire delay.
Coming soon to Slashdot: meta-meta-moderation!
I think a better summary would be that this is not entirely a new protocol. Rather, it's a variant on TCP with changes to the window increasing portion of the code. Basically, they claim that there currently exists an unfairness in allocation of bandwidth of two connections sharing a pipe. Basically that having different round trip times causes them to share the bandwidth unfairly. Their protocol supposedly alleviates this problem in high bandwidth pipes whereas TCP does not.
- It is a transport-layer protocol, such as
TCP, making statements such as
"New protocol could speed Internet significantly"
(the title on the article page) a bit bogus, but "BIC-TCP 6,000 Times Quicker Than DSL" utterly clueless.
- It addresses the problem that TCP connections over low latencies get to adjust their windows faster than their higher-latencies buddies sharing a link, causing the lower latency TCP connection to get more of the bandwidth before the link is filled up (and both TCP's back off due to their congestion window).
- The window size is adjusted using binary search instead of an exponential increase; somehow this makes this new protocol able to adjust its window size to the maximum (representing optimum bandwidth utilisation) faster than regular TCP. Why this is remains puzzling, because both binary search and TCP (which uses a factor of the previous window size) should reach their windows sizes in logarithmic time, as both searches are exponentially fast.
The rest of the article can be summarized as harmless fluff and clueless crud, as far as I'm concerned."What takes TCP two hours to determine, BIC can do in less than one second," Rhee said.
This is very puzzling indeed, the article doesn't back it up in the least.
40 Megasiemens? Don't you also need to know the capacitance and inductance of the connection in order to figure out the ping time from that?
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