Despite its long and successful history, TCP is ill-suited for modern datacenters. Every significant element of TCP, from its stream orientation to its expectation of in-order packet delivery, is inadequate for the datacenter environment. The fundamental issues with TCP are too interrelated to be fixed incrementally; the only way to harness the full performance potential of modern networks is to introduce a new transport protocol. Homa, a novel transport protocol, demonstrates that it is possibl...

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