Equation-based TCP-friendly congestion control under lossy environment

A major problem in supporting multimedia streaming in the Internet is that the streaming protocol used tends to take bandwidth away from competing TCP traffic streams. Thus it is important to devise rate based protocols that are TCP-friendly. In the paper we examine the effectiveness of two important models in devising TCP-friendly rate based protocols in lossy environment such as wireless networks. Using simulation for a variety of network scenarios, it is shown that the rate based protocols based on one model underestimates while the other overestimates TCP bandwidth in the presence of errors. A modification is made to the models which allows us to construct a rate based protocol that can track TCP bandwidth better in the presence of random error and hence exhibit behavior that is more TCP-friendly. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.