New trends in communication, in particular the deployment of multicast and real-time audio/video streaming applications, are likely to increase the percentage of non-TCP traffic in the Internet. These applications rarely perform congestion control in a TCP-friendly manner; they do not share the available bandwidth fairly with applications built on TCP, such as Web browsers, FTP, or e-mail clients. The Internet community strongly fears that the current evolution could lead to congestion collapse and starvation of TCP traffic. For this reason, TCP-friendly protocols are being developed that behave fairly with respect to coexistent TCP flows. We present a survey of current approaches to TCP friendliness and discuss their characteristics. Both unicast and multicast congestion control protocols are examined, and an evaluation of the different approaches is presented.

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A survey on TCP-friendly congestion control

We present a single rate multicast congestion control scheme (pgmcc) which is TCP-friendly and achieves scalability, stability and fast response to variations in network conditions. pgmcc is suitable for both non-reliable and reliable data transfers; it uses a window-based TCP-like controller based on positive ACKs and run between the sender and a group's representative, the acker. The innovative part of pgmcc is a fast and low-overhead procedure to select (and track changes of) the acker, which permits us to consider the acker as a moving receiver rather than a changing one. As such, the scheme is robust to measurement errors, and supports fast response to changes in the receiver set and/or network conditions. The scheme has been implemented in the PGM protocol, and the paper presents a number of experimental results on its performance.

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pgmcc: a TCP-friendly single-rate multicast congestion control scheme

Multicast services have been increasingly used by various continuous media applications. The QoS requirements of these continuous media applications prompt the necessity for QoS-driven, constraint-based multicast routing. This article provides a comprehensive overview of existing multicast routing algorithms, protocols, and their QoS extension. In particular, we classify multicast routing problems according to their optimization functions and performance constraints, present basic routing algorithms in each problem class, and discuss their strengths and weaknesses. We also categorize existing multicast routing protocols, outline the issues and challenges in providing QoS in multicast routing, and point out possible future research directions.

Multicast routing and its QoS extension: problems, algorithms, and protocols

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is the most commonly used transport protocol on the Internet. All indications assure that mobile computers and their wireless communication links will be an integral part of the future internetworks. In this paper, we present how regular TCP is well tuned to react to packet loss in wired networks. We then define mobility and the problems associated with it. We discuss why regular TCP is not suitable for mobile hosts and their wireless links by providing simulation results that demonstrate the effect of the high bit error rates of the wireless link on TCP performance. We discuss and illustrate the problems caused by the mobility of hosts using a graph tracing packets between fixed and mobile hosts. We then present a survey of the research done to improve the performance of TCP over mobile wireless networks. We classify the proposed solutions into three categories: link layer, end-to-end and split. We discuss the intuition behind each solution and present example protocols of each category. We discuss the protocols functionality, their strengths and weaknesses. We also provide a comparison of the different approaches in the same category and on the category level. We conclude this survey with a recommendation of the features that need to be satisfied in a standard mobile TCP protocol.

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Improving TCP performance over mobile networks

Congestion and flow control is an integral part of any Internet data transport protocol. It is widely accepted that the congestion avoidance mechanisms of TCP have been one of the key contributors to the success of the Internet. However, TCP is ill-suited to real-time multimedia streaming applications. Its bursty transmission, and abrupt and frequent wide rate fluctuations cause high delay jitters and sudden quality degradation of multimedia applications. For asymmetric networks such as wireless networks, cable modems, ADSL, and satellite networks, transmitting feedback for (almost) every packet received as it is done in TCP causes congestion in the reverse path. In this environment, TCP may severely underutilize the forward path throughput. Use of multicast further complicates the problem; TCP-like frequent feedback from each receiver to the sender in a large scale multicast session cause well-known scalability limitations (e.g. acknowledgment implosion). We have developed a new flow control approach for multimedia streaming, called TCP emulation at receivers (TEAR). TEAR shifts most of flow control mechanisms to receivers. In TEAR, a receiver does not send to the sender the congestion signals detected in its forward path but rather processes them immediately to determine its own appropriate receiving rate. TEAR can determine this rate using congestion signals observed at the receiver. These signals are used to emulate the TCP sender’s flow control functions at receivers.The emulation allows receivers to estimate a TCP-friendly rate for the congestion conditions observed in their forward paths. TEAR also allows receivers to adjust their receiving rates to a TCP-friendly rate without actually modulating the rates to probe for spare bandwidth, or to react to packet losses directly. Thus, the perceived rate fluctuations at the application are much more smooth than in TCP. A unicast version of TEAR is implemented. This report describes the implementation of TEAR, examine the performance of this TEAR implementation from the NS simulation and Internet experiments, and compare it with that of other TCP-friendly flow control techniques. Our preliminary tests indicate that TEAR shows superior fairness to TCP with significantly lower rate fluctuations than TCP. TEAR’s sensitivity to feedback interval is very low, so that even under high feedback latency, TEAR flows exhibit acceptable performance in terms of fairness, TCP-friendliness, and rate fluctuations. Finally, I will discuss the future extension of TEAR for multicast environments. This work is supported in part by NSF CAREER ANI-9875651.

TEAR: TCP emulation at receivers – flow control for multimedia streaming

We present MTCT, a congestion control scheme for large-scale reliable multicast. Congestion control for reliable multicast is important because of its wide applications in multimedia and collaborative computing, yet nontrivial, because of the potentially large number of receivers involved. Many schemes have been proposed to handle the recovery of lost packets in a scalable manner; but there is little work on the design and implementation of congestion control schemes for reliable multicast. We propose new techniques that can effectively handle instances of congestion occurring simultaneously at various parts of a multicast tree. Our protocol incorporates several novel features: (1) hierarchical congestion status reports that distribute the load of processing feedback from all receivers across the multicast group, (2) the relative time delay (RTD) concept which overcomes the difficulty of estimating round-trip times in tree-based multicast environments, (3) window-based control that prevents the sender from transmitting faster than packets leave the bottleneck link an the multicast path through which the sender's traffic flows, (4) a retransmission window that regulates the flow of repair packets to prevent local recovery from causing congestion, and (5) a selective acknowledgment scheme that prevents independent (i.e., non-congestion-related) packet loss from reducing the sender's transmission rate. We have implemented MTCP both on UDP in SunOS 5.6 and on the simulator ns, and we have conducted extensive Internet experiments and simulation to test the scalability and inter-fairness properties of the protocol. The encouraging results we have obtained support our confidence that TCP-like congestion control for large-scale reliable multicast is within our grasp.

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Nallathambi Balaguru

Papers

MTCP: scalable TCP-like congestion control for reliable multicast

MTCP: scalable TCP-like congestion control for reliable multicast