Toward a user-level real-time transport protocol with selective reliability

Application-controlled congestion control and feedback serve to support latency-sensitive streaming media applications. Moving parts of the protocol processing into user space is one of the promising techniques for providing applications with the flexibility of network control. This paper presents a user-level implementation of the transport functionality to support real-time streaming media applications. This transport functionality consists of a supportive framework and a selective retransmission method. The supportive framework facilitates the interaction between a real-time streaming media application and the user-level implementation of a transport protocol stack. The selective retransmission method allows an application to control the transmission of packets. The prominent feature of this user-level transport functionality is its ability of enabling real-time streaming media applications to control the transmission of data packets.