Researchers make the Web faster
Published: 06 Jun 2003 09:26 BST
A research team has unveiled a new system to turbocharge the Internet, claiming to be able to achieve speeds so high an entire movie can be downloaded in mere seconds.
The team is already talking to Microsoft and Disney to look into using the system to deliver high-quality video over the Web.
According to the journal New Scientist, the breakthrough was achieved by a team from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
The new system, coined Fast TCP, can boost download speeds dramatically while using the existing Internet infrastructure. Currently, all Internet traffic uses a system developed in the 1970s called Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), which breaks down large files into smaller data packets of about 1,500 bytes.
During transmission, the sending computer transmits a packet, waits for a signal from the recipient which acknowledges its safe arrival, and then sends the next packet.
If there is no receipt, the sender will transmit the same packet at half the speed of the previous one, and repeats this process until the data is sent. The report said even minor glitches en route can result in sluggish connections.
With Fast TCP however, software and hardware installed on the sending computer continually measures the time taken for sent packets to arrive and how long acknowledgements take to come back.
This provides early warning of likely packet losses. As a result, the Fast TCP software can predict the highest data rate the connection can support without losing data, said the report.
Last November, teams from Caltech, Stanford and CERN (European Laboratory for Particle Physics) near Geneva in Switzerland, sent data 10,000 kilometres from Sunnyvale, California, to CERN at an average rate of 925 megabits per second. Ordinary TCP managed just 266 megabits per second on the same network.
With 10 Fast TCP systems working in unison, the researchers have hit speeds of over 8.6 gigabits per second, more than 6,000 times the capacity of ordinary broadband.
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