TCP friendly rate control using adaptive reordering threshold

Abstract

TCP Friendly Rate Control (TFRC), which competes with TCP traffic, is a protocol designed for unicast flows operating in the Internet environment. Whereas TCP has evolved to be more robust on packet reordering, TFRC does not adequately address this packet reordering issue. As packet reordering is more likely to be introduced into the Internet by the use of parallelism and multi-path routing, TFRC``s lack of mechanism to deal with packet reordering will diminish its performance at paths that reorder packets. In an effort to develop a more reordering tolerant Internet architecture, we propose an improved TFRC model that can solve this problem. Our model improves TFRC``s performance using adaptive reordering threshold (TFRC-ART) based on inspected network reordering degree. We increase the threshold when reordering events which has larger degree of current value occurs and decrease it on packet drops. This scheme was evaluated using Network Simulator (NS). We found that our model showed the good performance in terms of robustness on packet reordering. This is simple to implement into current TFRC and it does not add complexity in terms of running time and memory usage.