A Survey of TCP-Friendly Congestion Control Mechanisms for Multimedia Traffic
Karl‐Johan Grinnemo, Anna Brunström · 2003
The stability and performance of the Internet to date have in a large part been due to the congestion control mechanism employed by TCP. However, while the TCP conges-tion control is appropriate for traditional applications such as bulk data transfer, it has been found less than ideal for multimedia applications. In particular, audio and video streaming applications have difficulties managing the rate halving performed by TCP in response to congestion. To this end, the majority of multimedia applications use either a congestion control scheme which reacts less drastic to congestion and therefore often is more aggressive than TCP, or, worse yet, no congestion control whatsoever. Since the Internet community strongly fears that a rapid deployment of multimedia applica-tions which do not behave in a fair and TCP-friendly manner could endanger the current stability and performance of the Internet, a broad spectrum of TCP-friendly congestion control schemes have been proposed. In this report, a survey over contemporary propos-als of TCP-friendly congestion control mechanisms for multimedia traffic in the Internet is presented. A classification scheme is outlined which shows how the majority of the