New TCP-friendly, rate-based transport protocol for media streaming applications

The increasing growth on the Internet for multimedia streaming poses severe challenges for the dominant transport control protocol TCP, but without a fair demand on resources such network flows threaten the stability of the Internet. A rate-based transport protocol, employing a SIMD window-based congestion mechanism, is described and comparative simulations with other protocols are provided. Rate-based SIMD exhibits clear advantages in terms of TCP-friendliness, smoothness of transmission rates and appropriate responsiveness to changing network conditions.