Can DCCP Replace UDP in Changing Network Conditions?

DCCP is proposed to replace UDP for its ability of congestion control while maintaining its promptness by ignoring lost packets as UDP does. The network would suffer less congestion. However, whether the applications that switch from UDP to DCCP can maintain their needed performance or not is a big question. This paper investigates this problem by evaluating DCCP based VoIP vs. a variety of TCPs using NS-2 simulator. Our study shows that DCCP has a disadvantage in competing network bandwidth with existing TCPs. DCCP based VoIP may perform poorly in facing the competition of TCP traffics.