Enhancing TCP for applications with soft real-time constraints
Karl‐Johan Grinnemo, Anna Brunström · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2001
Experiences in the use of the Internet as a delivery medium for multimedia-based applications have revealed serious deficiencies in its ability to provide the QoS of Multimedia Applications. We propose an extension to TCP that addresses the QoS requirements of applications with soft real-time constraints. Although, TCP has been found unsuitable for real-time applications, it can with minor modifications be adjusted to better comply with the QoS needs of applications with soft real-time requirements. Enhancing TCP with support for this group of applications is important since the congestion control mechanism of TCP assures stability of the Internet. In contrast, specialized multimedia protocols that lack appropriate congestion control can never be deployed on a large scale basis. Two factors of great importance for applications with soft real time constraints are jitter and throughput. By relaxing the reliability offered by TCP, the extension gives better jitter characteristics and an improved throughput. The extension only needs to be implemented at the receiving side. The reliability provided is controlled by the receiving application, thereby allowing a flexible tradeoff between different QoS parameters. In this paper, our TCP extension is presented and analyzed. The analysis investigates how the different application-controlled parameters influence performance. Our analysis is supported by a simulation study that investigates the tradeoff between interarrival jitter, throughput, and reliability. The simulation results also confirm that the extended version of TCP still behaves in a TCP-friendly manner.