Implementation and Evaluation of Transport Layer Protocol Executing Error Correction (ECP)

摘要

Technologies for retransmission control and error correction are available for communications over the Internet to improve reliability of data. For communications that require the data reliability be ensured, TCP, which performs retransmission control, is often employed. However, for environments and services where response confirmation and retransmission are difficult, error correction technologies are employed. Error correction is generally implemented on UDP, but the existing framework implemented on UDP frequently does not consider the maximum frame size of the data link layer and relegates data division to the IP module. The IP module divides data according to the maximum size for the data link, and the receiving IP module reconstructs the divided data. For a data link layer typified by the current Ethernet with an error detection function, the frame is often destroyed upon error detection. At the IP module, the specification allows destruction of the entire dataset whenever divided data necessary for reconstruction is incomplete. Consequently, an error in a single bit results in a total loss of data handed to the IP module, and thus error correction performance declines with the increase in data size handed to the IP module. The present study considers the MTU of the data link layer and proposes error correction protocol (ECP) over IP, which decreases the transfer data volume flowing to the data link layer by dividing data into blocks of appropriate size based on designated error correction code and its parameters (thus improving error correction performance) and assesses the performance of ECP. Experimental results demonstrate that performance is comparable or better than existing error correction frameworks. Results also show that when a specification not ensuring the reliability of the data link layer was employed, error correction was superior to existing frameworks on UDP.