Complementing TCP Congestion Control with Forward Error Correction

In this paper, we examine an emerging combination of challenges for TCP: increasingly bursty background traffic that is not subject to flow and congestion control, higher bandwidth networks and small buffers at network routers. As a result, TCP experiences short-term bursty packet losses that may not reflect long-term congestion. In this work, we propose a balanced approach that uses TCP congestion control mechanisms including Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) to identify and overcome congestion, supported by adaptive FEC for short-term packet loss recovery due to bursty flows. We demonstrate the effectiveness of using FEC with TCP SACK congestion control by showing that such an approach improves performance for TCP flows for the emerging bursty traffic, small buffer, high bandwidth-delay product environments.