SREcon19 Asia/Pacific - TCP—Architecture, Enhancements, and Tuning

Dinesh Dhakal, LinkedIn

This talk will dive deep into the workings of one of the crucial internet protocols, the Transmission Control Protocol, and further highlight the challenges around it. We will discuss the architecture and design principles that led to the development of the protocol, followed by the detailed study of its workings covering the 3-way handshake, the sliding window mechanism and how TCP achieves reliability and congestion control. Moreover, there have been various enhancements and extensions that have been proposed over the years that have led to better efficiency of the protocol in multiple scenarios. We will then discuss the possible improvements in speed and efficiency that can be achieved easily by tuning a few parameters available to us today.