Linux Journal: T/TCP: TCP for Transactions

Jan 30, 2000, 15:44 (0 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Mark Stacey)

"T/TCP is an experimental extension for the TCP protocol. It was designed to address the need for a transaction-based transport protocol in the TCP/IP stack."

"TCP and UDP are the current choices available for transaction-based applications. TCP is reliable but inefficient for transactions, whereas UDP is unreliable but highly efficient. T/TCP sits between these two protocols, making it an alternative for certain applications."

"Currently, several flavours of UNIX support T/TCP. SunOS 4.1.3 (a Berkeley-derived kernel) was the very first implementation of T/TCP, and made available in September 1994. The next implementation was for FreeBSD 2.0, released in March 1995. For my final-year project, I implemented T/TCP for Linux at the University of Limerick in April 1998...."

"In this article, I discuss the operation, advantages and flaws of T/TCP. This will allow application developers to decide when T/TCP is appropriate for networking applications. I present my results from a comparative analysis between T/TCP and TCP, based on the number of packets per session for each transaction. I also give my conclusions from a case study I conducted into the possible impact of T/TCP on the World Wide Web."

Complete Story

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