Improving Internet reliability

has won a multi-million dollar, multi-year contract from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (

) to develop technologies to improve the performance of mission-critical computer networks used during combat and other vital operations.

HP's Public Sector organisation collaborated on the winning proposal with HP Labs, the company's central research facility, and HP's consulting and integration business unit.

The project seeks to improve the reliability of TCP/IP (Transaction Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) – the basic communication system on which the entire Internet is based.

Because Internet links are heterogeneous, with dramatically different capabilities, today's Internet frequently suffers from great variations in performance. High-end throughput depends on avoiding poor-performing network paths and rapidly routing around them.

Despite decades of research, legacy routing protocols often fail to detect and adapt quickly to changing network connectivity and behaviour. Also, TCP/IP often does not perform as well over wireless networks because it is not optimized for "lossy" environments, in which some amount of redundant data is lost during transmission.