Congestion control for coded transport layers

Abstract

The application of congestion control can have a significant detriment to the quality of service experienced at higher layers, especially under high packet loss rates. The effects of throughput loss due to the congestion control misinterpreting packet losses in poor channels is further compounded for applications such as HTTP and video leading to a significant decrease in the user's quality of service. Therefore, we consider the application of congestion control to transport layer packet streams that use error-correction coding in order to recover from packet losses. We introduce a modified AIMD approach, develop an approximate mathematic model suited to performance analysis, and present extensive experimental measurements in both the lab and the “wild” to evaluate performance. Our measurements highlight the potential for remarkable performance gains, in terms of throughput and upper layer quality of service, when using coded transports.