TCP smoothness and window adjustment strategy

Abstract

We observe that even when the system throughput is relatively stable,end users of media-streaming applications do not necessarily experience smooth throughput, due to the unsynchronized window adjustments triggered by random congestion indications. We analyze and evaluate the negative impact of random window adjustments on smoothness, short-term fairness, and long-term fairness. We further propose an experimental congestion avoidance mechanism, namely TCP(/spl alpha/, /spl beta/, /spl gamma/, /spl delta/), based on coordinated window adjustments. The flow-level smoothness is enhanced significantly for media-streaming applications, without a cost on fairness and responsiveness. Responsiveness is even boosted when bandwidth is underutilized.