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TCP is a wire-centric protocol being forced to cut the cord, painfully

Sebby

He's certainly right that TCP could perform better with random non-systematic losses or delays, though as said we have now got pretty good at fast recovery and extensions like SACK make it easier to go very far very fast with minimal overhead.

However before we start dicking around with TCP, first kill one of the worst bloodsuckers of TCP performance in mobile environments or anywhere else: NAT. Mobile operators were quite happy roping people into their walled gardens back then, and news flash the Internet turned out to be important, so most of us are now talking to the Net by way of IP translation. Because of NAT we are using stupid tricks to keep TCP sessions alive, and wasting precious resources (energy, bandwidth) doing it. The state management and scaling issues are surely quite substantial in an increasingly mobile world, and the time spent translating is not spent shoving bytes around. Certainly the current situation leaves a lot of room for layer 4 manipulation, so I have to imagine that this research is way above the level of deployment. Still, NAT is evil and should be stamped out.

Just my thoughts.

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