RAAR: A TCP-friendly Congestion Control Mechanism of Transporting Multimedia Traffic in Internet

Abstract

This paper proposes a unicast mechanism of Rate Adaptation At Receivers called RAAR. It can be used to transport multimedia traffic. UDP and TCP dominate in current Internet. Neither TCP nor UDP can be used by multimedia traffic, because the TCP reduces the sending rate in half in response to a single packet drop and UDP has no congestion control mechanism. RAAR ameliorates GAIMD at receivers and has good smoothness of sending rate and fairness with competing TCP flows. RAAR is simple to implement. Our simulations show that the performances of RAAR are better than TFRC obviously. RAAR is also a promising scheme of development for congestion control of multicast multimedia traffic, because it is not a per-packet acknowledgement mechanism and its rate adaptation is implemented at receivers.