Advanced notification system for TCP performance increase

Network throughput increase is usually associated with replacement of communication links and appropriate network devices. This approach is usually intrusive, expensive and nevertheless time consuming. On the other hand it is necessary to bear in mind that effective and less intrusive increase of network throughput can be achieved via the improvement of existing protocol stack especially network and transport layer protocols. In this paper we propose an advanced notification system for TCP congestion control called ACNS (Advanced Congestion Notification System). This new approach allows TCP flows prioritization based on the flow age and carried priority. The aim of this approach is to penalize old and greedy TCP flows with a low priority in order to provide more bandwidth for young and prioritized TCP flows while providing more accurate details for loss type classification which is especially useful in wireless environment. Using ACNS specific TCP end nodes can be informed how to modify the size of their congestion window. This allows us to notify TCP end nodes sooner than the congestion results in packet loss. By means of penalizing and prioritizing specific TCP flows significant improvement of network throughput can be achieved.