Improved
data transport and management within a
network communication system may be achieved by utilizing a transmit
timer incorporated within the sender device and exploiting host-level statistics for a plurality of connections between a sender and
receiver. The period of the transmit
timer may be periodically adjusted based on a ratio of the smoothed round-trip time and the smoothed
congestion window, thereby reducing or eliminating bursty
data transmission commonly associated with conventional TCP architectures. For applications having a plurality of connections between a sender and a
receiver that share a common channel, such as web applications, the
congestion window and smoothed round trip time estimates for all active connections may be used to initialize new connections and allocate bandwidth among existing connections. This aspect of the present invention may reduce the destructive interference that may occur as different connections compete with one another to maximize the bandwidth of each connection without regard to other connections serving the same application. Error
recovery may also be improved by incorporating a short
timer and a long timer that are configured to reduce the size of the
congestion window and the corresponding
transmission rate in response to a second
packet loss with a predefined time period in order to increase resilience to random
packet loss.