An Analytical Study on TCP-friendly Congestion Control for Multimedia Streams

The TCP-style AIMD congestion control principle can't meet the need of the upcoming multimedia applications. They demand smooth adjustment and congestion aware, thus recently many works design TCPfriendly congestion control algorithms. In this paper, we focus on understanding one class of TCP-friendly congestion control algorithms, adjustment-based congestion control, which adjust transmission rate when loss is detected and can generalize TCP-style additive-increase by increasing inversely proportional to a power k of the current window (for TCP, k=0) and generalize TCP-style multiplicative-decrease by decreasing proportional to a power l of the current window (for TCP, l=1). We discuss their global fairness and stability. We prove that such class of congestion control algorithms can achieve (p, k+l+1)- proportional fairness globally no matter the network topology is and how many users there are. We also study their dynamical behaviors through a control theoretical approach. The smoothness of the congestion control will result in a less stable system and slower convergence to the fair bandwidth allocation. The modeling and discussions in this paper are quite general and can be easily applied to equation-based TCP-friendly congestion control scheme, another category of TCP-friendly transport protocols.

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