A survey of transmission control protocol variants

TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), is a reliable connection oriented end-to-end protocol. It contains within itself, mechanisms for ensuring reliability by requiring the receiver to acknowledge the segments that it receives. The network is not perfect and a small percentage of packets are lost enroute, either due to network error or due to the fact that there is congestion in the network and the routers are dropping packets. TCP ensures reliability by starting a timer whenever it sends a segment. If it does not receive an acknowledgement from the receiver within the ‘time-out’ interval then it retransmits the segment. In this paper a review of various TCP is carried out. There are a number of TCP variants for application in the management of network efficiency in terms of network congestion and transmission efficiency. These variants include: - TCP Tahoe, TCP Reno, TCP New Reno, TCP Vegas, TCP SACK, TCP FACK, TCP Asym, TCP RBP, Full TCP and TCP CUBIC. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to study the tcp types on the network performance variances. All have different features and advantages but with maximal throughput as main objective, which are termed as the clones of TCP, have been incorporated into TCP/IP protocol for handling congestion efficiently in different network scenarios.