System and method for efficient transport of large data files

Telecommunication networks are under stress due to rapid traffic increase cause mostly by large file transfers. Disclosed herein is a cross-layer transport protocol specifically designed to efficiently handle large transactions. Traffic generated from large transactions is shaped into a periodic succession of fixed-size data frames. Each transaction can then be scheduled for transmission using a two-way reservation protocol. Exemplary results show that the proposed approach is capable of significantly improving goodput and end-to-end delay relative to TCP, improving efficiency of bandwidth utilization by over 40%.