Title: Promoting the use of reliable rate-based transport protocols: the Chameleon protocol

Authors: Emmanuel Lochin, Guillaume Jourjon, Sebastien Ardon, Patrick Senac

Addresses: CNRS, LAAS, 7 Avenue du Colonel Roche, F-31077 Toulouse, France; Universite de Toulouse, UPS, INSA, INP, ISAE, LAAS, F-31077 Toulouse, France. ' National ICT Australia Ltd., Locked bag 9013, Alexandria NSW 1430, Australia. ' National ICT Australia Ltd., Locked bag 9013, Alexandria NSW 1430, Australia. ' CNRS, LAAS, 7 Avenue du Colonel Roche, F-31077 Toulouse, France; Universite de Toulouse, UPS, INSA, INP, ISAE, LAAS, F-31077 Toulouse, France

Abstract: Rate-based congestion control, such as TFRC, has not been designed to enable reliability. Indeed, the birth of TFRC protocol has resulted from the need for a congestion-controlled transport protocol in order to carry multimedia traffic. However, certain applications still prefer the use of UDP in order to implement their own congestion control on top of it. The present contribution proposes to design and validate a reliable rate-based protocol based on the combined use of TFRC, SACK and an adapted flow control. We argue that rate-based congestion control is a perfect alternative to window-based congestion control as most of today applications need to interact with the transport layer and should not be only limited to unreliable services. In this paper, we detail the implementation of a reliable rate-based protocol named Chameleon and bring out to the networking community an ns-2 implementation for evaluation purpose.

Keywords: transport protocols; reliable rate-based protocols; TCP-friendly rate control; TFRC; SACK; protocol implementation; congestion control; multimedia; networking.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIPT.2010.039229

International Journal of Internet Protocol Technology, 2010 Vol.5 No.4, pp.175 - 189

Published online: 28 Mar 2011 *

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