A Loss Discrimination Scheme for TFRC in Last Hop Wireless Networks

TFRC is a unicast transport layer protocol, which is designed for media streaming. Since TFRC is designed to provide nearly the same amount of throughput as that of TCP on wired networks, TFRC considers that all the losses are caused by congestion. Consequently, TFRC flow over wireless link experiences performance degradation. To improve TFRC performance over wireless links, we propose TFRC with additional sequence number (TFRC-ASN) scheme. TFRC-ASN is designed to discriminate wireless losses from congestion losses when the receiver estimates the packet loss interval. In TFRC-ASN, additional sequence number (ASN) is used at an access point or a base station to count the number of packets sent over wireless link. In contrast to existing schemes, TFRC-ASN can discriminate accurately wireless losses and also can estimate packet error rate in wireless link by observing TFRC sequence number and ASN. In addition to performance improvement, the loss discrimination algorithm used in TFRC-ASN does not need any information from the layers below the transport layer.