An Internet friendly transport protocol for continuous media over best effort networks

In this paper, we design and evaluate an Internet friendly transport-level protocol (IFTP) for solving the TCP-friendly problem. IFTP has two modes of operation. In the standard mode, the IFTP connection faithfully emulates the behaviour of TCP in order to roughly obtain a bandwidth equal to that of a TCP connection. In the extended mode, a simple modification is used to grant QoS-differentiated services to selected connections. Connections running in the extended mode can get enhanced bandwidth while still emulating the general behaviour of TCP. We develop an analytical model for the congestion control mechanism of IFTP. We also derive analytically the amount of bandwidth that IFTP may be able to claim from TCP in ideal and non-ideal environments. We evaluate IFTP through simulation and prove its TCP friendliness as well as provide performance results on some of the important metrics such as packet delay, delay jitter, packet loss and link utilization. Copyright # 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.