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Dear Editor-in-Chief,Researchers in North Carolina State University's Department ofComputer Science have developed a new data transfer protocol forthe Internet.The protocol is named BIC-TCP, which stands for Binary IncreaseCongestion Transmission Control Protocol. In a recent comparativestudy run by the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), BICconsistently topped the rankings in a set of experiments thatdetermined its stability, scalability and fairness in comparisonwith other protocols. The study tested six other protocolsdeveloped by researchers from schools around the world, includingthe California Institute of Technology and the University Collegeof London.Dr. Injong Rhee, associate professor of computer science, saidBIC can operate, given appropriate medium, at speeds approaching 10gigabits per second (Gbps) which is roughly 6,000 times that of DSLand 150,000 times that of current modems. While this mighteventually translate into music downloads in the blink of an eye,the potential value of such a protocol is a real eye-opener.Rhee and NC State colleagues Dr. Khaled Harfoush, assistantprofessor 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 ElectronicsEngineers Communications Society, on Thursday, March 11.Many national and international computing labs are now involvedin large-scale scientific studies of nuclear and high-energyphysics, astronomy, geology and meteorology. Typically, Rhee said,"Data are collected at a remote location and need to be shipped tolabs where scientists can perform analyses and createhigh-performance visualizations of the data." Visualizations mightinclude satellite images or climate models used in weatherpredictions. Receiving the data and sharing the results can lead tomassive congestion of current networks, even on the newestwide-area high-speed networks such as ESNet (Energy SciencesNetwork), which was created by the U.S. Department of Energyspecifically for these types of scientific collaborations.The problem, Rhee said, is the inherent limitations of regularTCP. "The current form of TCP was originally designed in the 1980swhen Internet speeds were much slower and bandwidths much smaller,"he said. "Now we are trying to apply it to networks that haveseveral orders of magnitude more available bandwidth." Essentially,we're using an eyedropper to fill a water main. BIC, on the otherhand, would open the floodgate.Along with postdoctoral student Xu, Rhee has been working ondeveloping BIC for the past year, although Rhee said he has beenresearching network congestion solutions for at least a decade. Thekey to BIC's speed is that it uses a binary search approach -- afairly common way to search databases -- that allows for rapiddetection of maximum network capacities with minimal loss ofinformation. "While it may take classical TCP two hours to reachthe full capacity use of a 10 Gbps pipe with 100-millisecond roundtrip time, BIC needs only a few seconds," Rhee said. The greatestchallenge for the new protocol, he added, was to fill the pipe fastwithout starving out other protocols. "It's a tough balance," hesaid.By allowing the rapid transfer of increasingly large packets ofinformation over long distances, the new protocol could boost theefficacy of cutting-edge applications ranging from telemedicine andreal-time environmental monitoring to business operations andmulti-user gaming. At NC State, researchers could more readilyvisualize, monitor and control real-time simulations andexperiments conducted at remote computing clusters. BIC might evenhelp avoid a national disaster: The recent blackout that affectedlarge areas of the eastern United States and Canada underscored theneed to spread data-rich backup systems across hundreds ofthousands of miles.With network speeds doubling roughly annually, Rhee said theperformance demonstrated by the new protocol could become commonlyavailable in high-speed networks in the next few years.Sincerely,InjongRheerhee@csc.ncsu.edu
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