Google Explores Ways to a Faster Internet

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Author: John Duckgeischel on January 24, 2012 - 10:19 PM

Google’s engineers and technicians believe that by transforming the Web TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) transport layer as well trying new ways to minimize latency there can be real gains in improving the speed of the Internet. In fact Google has established a “Make the Web Faster” team which following through on recommendations to maximize TCP speed through various means including optimizing the initial congestion window. In a team blog, Yuchung Cheng called TCP "the workhorse of the Internet," because it delivers Web content and is designed to work of a wide range of network types. Currently Web browsers often open parallel TCP connections prior to making their requests, which solves the TCP connection limitation problem, but creates challenges because of high latency and its lack of scalability. "Our research shows that the key to reducing latency is saving round trips. We're experimenting with several improvements to TCP", Cheng said.

In solving challenges associate with the TCP initial congestion window Cheng said that his team has some recommendations to solve this problem as well. The amount of data sent at the beginning of a TCP connection is currently three packets, implying three round trips to deliver a tiny, 15K-sized content. Our experiments indicate that IW10 [initial congestion window of 10 packets] reduces the network latency of Web transfers by over 10 percent," Cheng stated. The company desires to reduce the initial timeout from three seconds to one second. "An RTT [round-trip time] of three seconds was appropriate a couple of decades ago, but today's Internet requires a much smaller timeout." For mobile networks that tend to be noisy, Google is working to develop algorithms for faster recovery. The company welcomes community involvement and is making open source available as its approach is promoted through IETF standards proposals, the Linux kernel and various well known research publications.

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