CTCP

CTCP, or "Common TCP," was a set of extensions to the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) developed in the early 1990s. It aimed to improve the performance and reliability of TCP, particularly for high-speed networks and applications that required robust data transfer. CTCP introduced several new features designed to address limitations of the original TCP standard.

One of the key innovations of CTCP was its enhanced congestion control mechanism. It implemented more sophisticated algorithms for detecting and reacting to network congestion, which could lead to faster recovery and more efficient use of network bandwidth. CTCP also included improvements for handling packet loss, aiming to reduce the impact of dropped packets on overall throughput.

Another notable aspect of CTCP was its support for delayed acknowledgments. This feature allowed for acknowledgments of received data to be held for a short period, potentially grouping them with subsequent acknowledgments. This could reduce the overhead associated with acknowledgments, especially in environments with high round-trip times.

While CTCP offered potential performance benefits, its widespread adoption was limited. The development of TCP options and the evolution of the base TCP protocol itself, through standards bodies like the IETF, led to the incorporation of many similar improvements directly into the mainstream TCP specification. As a result, CTCP remained a research project and an experimental enhancement rather than a universally implemented protocol. Its ideas, however, contributed to the ongoing refinement of TCP.