Effects of Loss Notification and Loss Differentiation on DCCP and TCP Performance
Johan Garcia, Anna Brunström · 2004
This paper examines the effects of non-congestion related wireless link errors on transport protocol performance. Although link-level retransmissions to a large extent can alleviate this problem for TCP, delay-sensitive applications using DCCP may not be well served by link-level retransmissions. The loss differentiation and loss notification mechanisms in DCCP are discussed, and the TFRC congestion control is numerically evaluated for wireless loss sensitivity. The results show that the use of loss differentiation can be critical for high rate senders. The results, however, also show that the blind use of DCCP loss differentiation for low rate senders may be inefficient considering the communications and computational overheads involved. Further, a TCP implementation modified to provide loss differentiation and loss notification is experimentally examined. As expected there are considerable gains from using loss differentiation.