TCP Fast Open

TitleTCP Fast Open
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2011
AuthorsRadhakrishnan, S., Cheng Y., Chu J., Jain A., & Raghavan B.
Other Numbers3296
Abstract

Today’s web services are dominated by TCP flows so short that they terminate a few round trips after handshaking; this handshake is a significant source of latency for such flows. In this paper we describe the design, implementation, and deployment of the TCP Fast Open protocol, a new mechanism that enables data exchange during TCP’s initial handshake. In doing so, TCP Fast Open decreases application network latency by one full round-trip time, decreasing the delay experienced by such short TCP transfers.

We address the security issues inherent in allowing data exchange during the three-way handshake, which we mitigate through the use of a security token that verifies IP address ownership.We also detail other fall-back defense mechanisms and address the issues we faced with middleboxes, backwards compatibility for existing network stacks, and incremental deployment. Based upon traffic analysis and network emulation, we show that TCP Fast Open would decrease average HTTP transaction network latency by 15% and whole-page load time over 10% on average, and in some cases up to 40%.

URLhttp://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/pubs/networking/ICSI_tcpfastopen11.pdf
Bibliographic Notes

Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on emerging Network EXperiments and Technologies (ACM CoNEXT 2011), Tokyo, Japan

Abbreviated Authors

S. Radhakrishnan, Y. Cheng, J. Chu, A. Jain, and B. Raghavan

ICSI Research Group

Networking and Security

ICSI Publication Type

Article in conference proceedings