Equation-based congestion control for unicast applications

This paper proposes a mechanism for equation-based congestion control for u nicast traffic. Most best-effort traffic in the current Internet is well-se rved by the dominant transport protocol, TCP. However, traffic such as best -effort unicast streaming multimedia could find use for a TCP-friendly cong estion control mechanism that refrains from reducing the sending rate in ha lf in response to a single packet drop. With our mechanism, the sender expl icitly adjusts its sending rate as a function of the measured rate of loss events, where a loss event consists of one or more packets dropped within a single round-trip time. We use both simulations and experiments over the I nternet to explore performance. We consider equation-based congestion control a promising avenue of develop ment for congestion control of multicast traffic, and so an additional moti vation for this work is to lay a sound basis for the further development of multicast congestion control.