Multimedia-unfriendly TCP congestion control and home gateway queue management

Abstract

Consumer broadband services are increasingly a mix of TCP-based and UDP-based applications, often with quite distinct requirements for interactivity and network performance. Consumers can experience degraded service when application traffic collides at a congestion point between home LANs, service provider edge networks and fractional-Mbit/sec `broadband' links. We illustrate two key issues that arise from the impact of TCP-based data transfers on real-time traffic (such as VoIP or online games) sharing a broadband link. First, well-intentioned modifications to traditional TCP congestion control can noticeably increase the latencies experienced by VoIP or online games. Second, superficially-similar packet dropping rules in broadband gateways can induce distinctly different packet loss rates in VoIP and online game traffic. Our observations provide cautionary guidance to researchers who model such traffic mixes, and to vendors implementing equipment at either end of consumer links.