Researchers at Colorado State University’s Computer Networking Research Laboratory are creating the “adaptive application-aware transport protocols.” They have invented a new Internet transport protocol where an application developer can specify how to respond to congestion. Their protocol, based on UDP, was created to support a new weather monitoring radar network – one that ditches huge, long-range antennas in favor of higher-density, lower-cost, short-range ones. This radar network requires that antennas transmit steady streams of high-volume data, hundreds of megabits per second. The new application-aware protocol was necessary to handle some funky high-bandwidth demands. For instance, while the app can tolerate some loss of packets it cannot tolerate many packets being dropped during the same burst. A test bed of the new weather-sensing system went live in May in tornado-famous Oklahoma. Eventually, the new protocol may be valuable for next-generation high-fidelity voice and video applications as well. For more info on the project, click here.
Julie Bort, jbort@nww.com
