TCP-RC: A receiver-centered TCP protocol for delay-sensitive applications

TCP is the de-facto standard transport-layer protocol in the Internet. However, TCP is generally considered to be inappropriate for delay-sensitive applications such as multimedia. This paper proposes a novel receiver-centered TCP (TCP-RC), which is a TCP modification at the receiver that is intended for delay-sensitive applications. The basic principle behind TCP-RC is that it achieves low latency at the expense of reliability. In particular, TCP-RC forges lost packets, passing them on to an enabled application. This allows low-latency transmission for a class of applications that do not demand full reliability. Results obtained from emulated experiments show that over a range of loss rates and round-trip times, TCP-RC has a significantly smaller average- and worst-case per-packet delay than regular TCP.