Subject: [Tsvwg] new draft on a scalable file transfer protocol - Saratoga

From: Lloyd Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 01 Nov 2007 00:02:51 +0000

http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-wood-tsvwg-saratoga-00.txt

We've designed and written up Saratoga, a UDP-based file transfer protocol aimed at providing high-performance delivery, particularly under unusual link conditions. 

Saratoga's strengths are:

- the ability to fully fill a private dedicated link at line rate, for fast hop-by-hop transfers.

- able to handle path asymmetry well with terse selective negative acknowledgements. TCP is generally recognised to need a forward path:back path ratio of 50:1 or better to avoid ack congestion on the back path; Saratoga implementations have worked with ratios of 850:1 and above.

- scalable efficient delivery for both the low end - 8-bit processors moving tiny <64K files - and the high end - tera-tera-terabyte and larger files - in the same protocol.

We're using Saratoga implementations operationally daily to deliver remote sensing imagery from satellites in orbit. This imagery is delivered as files of up to several gigabytes, and such files are expected to grow in size for later space missions with higher-resolution cameras.

We believe that Saratoga's fast transfers and ability to cope with large files will be of interest to high-performance grid and parallel computing, large database clusters, peer-to-peer networks, and delay-tolerant store-and-forward networking.

enjoy reading,

L.

Saratoga: http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/saratoga/

<http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/><[email-masked]>