The DITP protocol has been designed to minimize the time required to setup an operational connection. This is achieved by a simple method which is made explicit in the following figure.
In common protocols, like HTTP and SMTP, the server is expected to send a greeting before the client can respond and proceed by sending its first request.
The time the client has to wait for this greeting message is usually dominated by the round trip time. In a LAN the round trip time is less than a millisecond, but on Internet it will take many tens of milliseconds and sometime hundreds of millisecond if the server is on another continent.
By simply swapping the DITP open transaction orientation, we save one round trip time delay before the client can sent its first transaction request. Another advantage of this method is that the server can use a very narrow timeout window for the arrival of the DITP connection setup request. This protects against some type of DOS attacks.
There are two additional things we can observe from the previous figure.
1.- The HTTP or SMTP protocol could be optimized by allowing the client to send its first data without having to wait for the server greeting.
2.- The round trip time due to TCP could be avoided if we could combine it with the DITP connection set up and the two first requests. There is clearly room for improvement on this layer, but this is out of scope regarding this project.
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