A Swifter Start for TCP

While TCP is capable of adapting its data rate to almost any capacity, it has long been known that TCP takes a long time to achieve full data rates on paths with high capacity (especially links with long delays, e.g. satellite links). In this paper we present a new way for TCP to estimate available network capacity and swiftly scale its transmission rate at the start of a TCP connection. While the method does estimate capacity, as predicted by prior simulation [12], the limited studies reported in this paper suggest it performs slightly worse than regular TCP over a low-delay modest-bandwidth Internet path.