CSC News

Computer Science researchers develop breakthrough scalable protocol

Dr. Injong Rhee, associate professor of computer science at North Carolina State University’s computer science department, with NC State post-doctoral student Lisong Xu, has developed a new data transfer protocol for the Internet that can help scientists and others who must move huge amounts of data over high speed networks, do so more quickly.

Rhee, Xu and NC State colleague Khaled Harfoush, assistant professor of computer science, presented a paper on their findings in early March at Infocom 2004, the 23rd meeting of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Communications Society held in Hong Kong.

The research findings have generated considerable interest in the technology media, including TechNewsWorld, where it was listed on March 16 as the most read story in the past 24 hours.

The protocol is named BIC-TCP, which stands for Binary Increase Congestion Transmission Control Protocol. In a comparative study run by the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in November 2003, BIC consistently topped the rankings in a set of experiments that determined its stability, scalability and fairness to 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.

Rhee said BIC can run in 10 gigabits per second (Gbps) networks, solving the performance problem of TCP, of which it is a variant. In a high bandwidth network beyond one Gbps, TCP severely underutilizes the available bandwidth because of its slow response. BIC solves this problem by modifying TCP's window increase function.

Read the complete story on the College of Engineering's Research News site.