I.

Introduction

Advanced Internet users always interested in high utilization and less standing queue at router
level in high bandwidth delay product (BDP) network. Explicit Congestion Control Protocol
(XCP) window-based like TCP implements at end points of connection provides all desired
requirements like more stability, reliability and efficiency. It is considered more scalable in
nature in high BDP where require per flow state required at router level [1]. Congestion window
(CWnd) and Round Trip Time (RTT) in congestion header maintained by sender in every packet
and this information communicated to routers. XCP routers supervise persistent buffer size and
input traffic rate and on the basis of some calculation like output link capacity and flows
congestion window and RTT states about increase or decrease in Cwnd to each flow sharing by
inserting feedback in congestion header. Feedback updated every time along the path on
bottlenecks routers and returned by receiver in an acknowledgement to the sender to update the
congestion window accordingly. As below figure 1.1 illustrates the working of XCP.

Router1
Router2

Congestion window

Round Trip Time

Feedback= +0.1 packet

Figure 1.1 XCP Network working flow

In this research paper we have analyzed the reasons after being multi folded features XCP, why
not adopted and deployed in real scenarios.
 II. Literature Review

Fair, flexible and analytical tractable XCP generalize the ECN facility of TCP, decouples
utilization control from fairness control and this will advantage a service differentiation feature.
Network resources can be used more efficiently and bandwidth can be allocated more flexibly
with the feature of decoupling. Analytical tractable feature match the aggregate traffic rate to the
link capacity while preventing the persistent queue to form at router level [2].

Pre-deterministic increase of congestion window is not suitable for variable bandwidth

environment and XCP does not have pre-determined congestion window increment but only
work at router level thus pro-active router support is required [3].

Heterogeneous perturbation flows, complex and dynamic topology doesnt effect on XCP and
high speed TCP but if said about deployment then high speed TCP can be deployed very easily
than XCP as it require end to end modification. Lack of availability of high buffer size doesnt
effect on tight and complex topology with the presence of XCP network [4].

Due to complex nature of XCP it is not easy to deploy as compare to other transport protocols.
XCP setup requires very high level of modification in Kernel setup of LINUX or UNIX. To
configure XCP there is changes required at both hosts (sender and receiver side) and router side
and moreover if more routers added in the path then XCP module also required and getting the
router module to compiled loaded and working is not a trivial task [5].

III. Experiment Evaluation

XCP end points H1H4 and R1 participated in XCP network illustrated in figure III.1 with
given configuration.

Router with XCP

H1 configuration

H2 100 Mbps
R1
H3

H4
Figure III.1 XCP Network configuration
[1] Zhang, Yongguang, and Thomas R. Henderson. "An implementation and experimental study
of the explicit control protocol (XCP)." Proceedings IEEE 24th Annual Joint Conference of the
IEEE Computer and Communications Societies.. Vol. 2. IEEE, 2005.

[2] Katabi, Dina, Mark Handley, and Charlie Rohrs, Congestion control for high bandwidth-
delay product networks. ACM SIGCOMM computer communication review 32.4 (2002): 89-
102.

[3] Lopez-Pacheco, D. M., and C. Pham. "Performance comparison of TCP, HSTCP and XCP in
high-speed, highly variable-bandwidth environments." Proc. of the IEEE 3rd Int. Conf. on
Network Protocols (ICNP 2004). Berlin. 2004.

[4] Chuvpilo, Gleb, and Jae Wook Lee. "A simulation based comparison between XCP and
HighSpeed TCP." Laboratory for Computer Science Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(2002).

[5] Hillyer, Bridget. "On the Performance Evaluation of High-Speed Transport Protocols."
(2006).