Evaluation of the QoS Offered by PRTP-ECN - A TCP-Compliant Partially Reliable Transport Protocol

The introduction of multimedia in the Internet imposes new QoS requirements on existing transport protocols. Since neither TCP nor UDP comply with these requirements, a common approach today is to use RTP/UDP and to relegate the QoS responsibility to the application. Even though this approach has many advantages, it also entails leaving the responsibility for congestion control to the application. Considering the importance of efficient and reliable congestion control for maintaining stability in the Internet, this approach may prove dangerous. Improved support at the transport layer is therefore needed. In this paper, a partially reliable transport protocol, PRTP-ECN, is presented. PRTP-ECN is a protocol designed to be both TCP-friendly and to better comply with the QoS requirements of applications with soft real-time constraints. This is achieved by trading reliability for better jitter characteristics and improved throughput. A simulation study of PRTP-ECN has been conducted. The outcome of this evaluation suggests that PRTPECN can give applications that tolerate a limited amount of packet loss significant reductions in interarrival jitter and improvements in throughput as compared to TCP. The simulations also verified the TCP-friendly behavior of PRTP-ECN.

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