Bandwidth feedback control of TCP and real time sources in the Internet

Abstract

This paper proposes a feedback based algorithm for congestion control and bandwidth allocation in the presence of either TCP traffic or both TCP and real time traffic. In this proposal, the network layer conveys bandwidth and propagation delay measurements to data sources, for instance using IPv6 optional fields. TCP sources use this bandwidth delay product to control their congestion window, while video sources use the available bandwidth feedback to adjust their data sending rate. The experiments show that with this approach, the network achieves stable equilibrium, and users, either transmitting TCP traffic or real-time traffic, can share network resources fairly. Furthermore, since TCP sources learn about the available bandwidth independent of packet loss, there is no need to reduce the congestion window following a packet loss. This provides a way to improve the TCP performance in wireless networks where it is difficult to distinguish between congestion loss and radio channel interference loss.