Oblivious TCP Support A Virtual Network Function to Speed Up TCP in Wireless Environments

In today's Internet, the TCP protocol is still the de facto transport layer protocol used to ensure reliable communications between two endpoints. However, this protocol incurs high packet retransmission delays due to its inherent packet loss detection and retransmission mechanisms [1]. To address TCP limitation without the need to change the TCP protocol, we propose, in this paper, a special virtual network function, called Transport Assistant, that can be deployed inside the network in order to obliviously support regular TCP connections in order to increase their throughput and minimize packet retransmission times. Indeed, the Transport Assistant is able to collect real-time measurements, cache packets, detect lost packets and retransmit them. The proposed Transport Assistant is a passive component operating at the transport layer, and hence, it has the advantage to be oblivious to the TCP endpoints and does not require any change the TCP protocol. Through extensive simulations, we show that using the Transport Assistant allows to speed up packet transmission times of packets by up to 30 % and can significantly reduce flow completion time and maximize the TCP throughput.