End system optimizations for high-speed TCP

The delivered TCP performance on high-speed networks is often limited by the sending and receiving hosts, rather than by the network hardware or the TCP protocol implementation itself. In this case, systems can achieve higher bandwidth by reducing host overheads through a variety of optimizations above and below the TCP protocol stack, given support from the network interface. This article surveys the most important of these optimizations and illustrates their effects quantitatively with empirical results from an experimental network delivering up to 2 Gb/s of end-to-end TCP bandwidth.