Stanford CS244 '13: TCP Fast Open
Winter 2013
JF Bastien & Sam D'Amico

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TCP Fast Open
http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en/us/pubs/archive/37517.pdf
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Read more at: http://reproducingnetworkresearch.wordpress.com/2013/03/13/tcp-fastopen/‎

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Abstract
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The Chrome web browser keeps HTTP connections open in the hopes of
reusing them and reducing the cost of creating TCP connections, but
even then about 1/3 of HTTP requests are with new TCP
connections. CDNs complicate things further by changing the server
which feeds different parts of a page. The purpose of TCP Fast Open
(TFO) is to exchange data during initial TCP handshake to remove an
RTT per TCP connection and reduce flow completion time, which makes
websites load faster.


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Reproducing Results
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Our first goal was to replicate table 1 in the TFO paper, which shows
page load times, both with and without TFO, for various common web
pages. For this we fetched amazon.com, nytimes.com, wsj.com and the
TCP Wikipedia pages, with all of their dependencies, and measured the
page load time with and without TFO. We tried this with 20ms, 100ms,
and 200ms of round-trip time, which we simulated with Mininet along
with a custom Chrome shell and Python’s simple HTTP server (serving a
locally-cached page), all running on an Amazon EC2 virtual machine
with a custom Linux kernel with TFO support. We succeeded in
reproducing the results from the paper.

Our results and code can be obtained on our Github TFO repository.
They can be reproduced by using our Amazon EC2 AMI:
named 474470461255/cs244-13-tcp-fastopen on the US-west-2 Oregon
location, AMI ami-c41085f4, launch as c1.xlarge, with security group
quicklaunch-1 (to enable SSH), and username “ubuntu”. Once logged on,
run sudo run.sh, located under ~/tcp-fastopen/. Make sure the VNC
server is on display 1, it should be by default.