Equation-based congestion control for unicast applications

TLDR

Most best‑effort traffic is served by TCP, but unicast streaming multimedia could benefit from a TCP‑friendly congestion control that avoids halving the sending rate after a single packet drop. This paper proposes an equation‑based congestion control mechanism for unicast traffic. The sender adjusts its rate as a function of the measured loss rate per round‑trip time, and the authors evaluate this approach with simulations and Internet experiments.

Abstract

This paper proposes a mechanism for equation-based congestion control for unicast traffic. Most best-effort traffic in the current Internet is well-served by the dominant transport protocol, TCP. However, traffic such as best-effort unicast streaming multimedia could find use for a TCP-friendly congestion control mechanism that refrains from reducing the sending rate in half in response to a single packet drop. With our mechanism, the sender explicitly adjusts its sending rate as a function of the measured rate of loss events, where a loss event consists of one or more packets dropped within a single round-trip time. We use both simulations and experiments over the Internet to explore performance.