Updated TCP Proposals and FreeBSD

There are a number of proposals for improving TCP performance coming out of Google that have some implications for FreeBSD. These proposals have taken the form of a group of IETF proposals, RFCs, patches to the Linux kernel, and research publications. A nice summary of the different initiatives is available from Lets Make TCP Faster on the Google Code Blog.

TCP Fast Open by Radhakrishnan, Cheng, Chu, Jain, and Raghavan is based on the observation that modern web services are dominated by TCP flows so short that they terminate a few round trips after handshaking. This means that the 3-way TCP handshake is a significant source of latency for such flows, and they describe a new mechanism for secure data exchange during the initial handshake to reduce some of the round-trip network transmission and associated latency for such short TCP transfers. This work shares many goals and challenges with T/TCP, which was previously in FreeBSD but suffered from some security vulnerabilities.

David Malone posted some thoughts on my Google+ post about how FreeBSD could implement the various changes. Maybe we could have some Summer of Code students work in this area this summer?