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TFRC friendliness and the case of ECN
Author(s) -
Bakthavachalu Sivakumar,
Labrador Miguel A.
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
international journal of communication systems
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.344
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1099-1131
pISSN - 1074-5351
DOI - 10.1002/dac.664
Subject(s) - computer science , computer network , tcp vegas , tcp friendly rate control , sack , network congestion , tcp westwood plus , explicit congestion notification , the internet , network packet , operating system , biology , agronomy
The TFRC protocol has been proposed as a TCP‐friendly protocol to transport streaming media over the Internet. However, its deployment is still questionable because it has not been compared to other important protocols, analysed in the presence of important mechanisms, such as the explicit congestion notification (ECN), and studied under more realistic network conditions. In this paper, we address these three aspects, including other congestion control protocols not considered before in the same investigation, such as TCP Tahoe, Reno, Newreno, Vegas, Sack, GAIMD, and the Binomial algorithms, the effect of using ECN in the friendliness of the protocols, and the fairness of the protocols under static and dynamic network conditions. We found that TFRC can be safely deployed in the Internet if competing with TCP Tahoe, New Reno and SACK since fairness is achieved under all scenarios considered. We also found that ECN actually helps in achieving better fairness. However, fairness problems arise when TFRC competes with TCP Reno, GAIMD, SQRT or IIAD in static or dynamic conditions, or both. We used normalized throughput, fairness index, and convergence time as the main performance metrics for comparison. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.