Enhanced TFRC for High Quality Video Streaming over High Bandwidth Delay Product Networks

Transmission control protocol friendly rate control (TFRC) is designed to mainly provide optimal service for unicast applications, such as multimedia streaming in the best-effort Internet environment. However, high bandwidth networks with large delays present an environment where TFRC may have a problem in utilizing the full bandwidth. TFRC inherits the slow-start mechanism of TCP Reno, but this is a time-consuming process that may require many round-trip-times (RTTs), until an appropriate sending rate is reached. Another disadvantage inherited from TCP Reno is the RTT-unfairness problem, which severely affects the performance of long-RTT flows. In this paper, we suggest enhanced TFRC for high quality video streaming over high bandwidth delay product networks. First, we propose a fast startup scheme that increases the data rate more aggressively than the slow-start, while mitigating the overshooting problem. Second, we propose a bandwidth estimation method to achieve more equitable bandwidth allocations among streaming flows that compete for the same narrow link with different RTTs. Finally, we improve the responsiveness of TFRC in the presence of severe congestion. Simulation results have shown that our proposal can achieve a fast startup and provide fairness with competing flows compared to the original TFRC.