TCP Fast Open
Venue
Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT), ACM (2011)
Publication Year
2011
Authors
Sivasankar Radhakrishnan, Yuchung Cheng, Jerry Chu, Arvind Jain, Barath Raghavan
BibTeX
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 using a
security token that verifies IP address ownership. We detail other fall-back
defense mechanisms and address issues we faced with middleboxes, backwards
compatibility for existing network stacks, and incremental deployment. Based on
traffic analysis and network emulation, we show that TCP Fast Open would decrease
HTTP transaction network latency by 15%and whole-page load time over 10% on
average, and in some cases up to 40%