Stochastic TCP Friendliness: Exploring the Design Space of
TCP-Friendly Traffic Control in the Best-Effort Internet

TCP friendliness has been proposed and used as a fundamental design principle for traffic control in the best-effort Internet in the last few years. The current notion of TCP friendliness is well suitable for applications that can quickly adapt their rates to network congestion. However, a significant fraction of Internet traffic is multimedia streaming traffic, which inherently has limited rate adaptability. As a result, the current notion of TCP friendliness considerably restricts the design space of traffic control protocols for multimedia streaming.

The goal of this project is to develop stochastic TCP-friendliness as a new fundamental design principle for traffic control in the best-effort Internet with the following two major components. First, developing a stochastic TCP-friendliness framework to qualitatively measure the statistical impact of a traffic control protocol on TCP performance, and to relatively compare the statistical impacts of two different protocols. Second, designing and evaluating a new class of stochastically TCP-friendly traffic control protocols for multimedia streaming, with the aim to considerably improve both TCP and UDP performance when compared with existing TCP-friendly protocols.

Selected Publications:

• Jie Feng, and Lisong Xu, "Stochastic TCP Friendliness: Expanding the Design Space of TCP-Friendly Traffic Control Protocols", in Computer Networks (Elsevier), February 2012

Related Links:

• Network Fairness Comparison Framework by Chiu and Tam, ACM SIGCOMM ASIA 2005, Computer Networks 2007
• TCP-Friendly Admission Control (TFAC) by Chiu et al., IEEE IWQoS 2006
• Probe-Based Admission Control by Karlsson et al., PDQ Link, IEEE IWQoS 2004
• TCP-Friendly Rate Control (TFRC) by Floyd et al., ICIR Link
• TCP Friendliness Projects, PSC Link
• Minimum Rate Guaranteed Service (MRG) by Ye, Wang et al., Work in Progress 2007