Congestion Control Requirements for Interactive Real-Time Media
Randell Jesup · 2021
Congestion control is needed for all data transported across the Internet, in order to promote fair usage and prevent congestion collapse. The requirements for interactive, point-to-point real-time multimedia, which needs low-delay, semi-reliable data delivery, are different from the requirements for bulk transfer like FTP or bursty transfers like Web pages. Due to an increasing amount of RTP-based real-time media traffic on the Internet (e.g. with the introduction of the Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC)), it is especially important to ensure that this kind of traffic is congestion controlled. This document describes a set of requirements that can be used to evaluate other congestion control mechanisms in order to figure out their fitness for this purpose, and in particular to provide a set of possible requirements for real-time media congestion avoidance technique.