Turnpike Project

The Turnpike project relies on diagnostic information provided by the Beacon toolkit, or an equivalent passive monitoring infrastructure to improve network utilization. Using such information, applications using the Turnpike control techniques can improve their own network performance and more efficiently utilize the network overall. Over individual TCP connections at the shortest time scales, Turnpike provides smoothing of flows and attempts to avoid packet bursts detectable by Beacon. Over medium time scales, Turnpike aggregates congestion control information for flows which are known to share the same bottleneck resources. And over the longest time scales, Turnpike can perform application-level congestion avoidance, both by performing more efficient scheduling of connections (avoiding re-use of a common bottleneck) and by redirecting connections to mirror servers which do not lie on resource-constrained paths.