An Enhancement of TFRC over Wireless Networks

TFRC is TCP-friendly rate control protocol with TCP Reno´s throughput equation based. It is designed to mainly provide optimal service for unicast multimedia flow operating in the best-effort Internet environment. However, due to Reno´s significant performance degradation in wireless networks, TFRC has also led to unavoidable performance suffering from wireless links due to the poor performance of Reno throughput. This paper proposes an enhancement of TFRC based on the differentiating method used in TCP Veno. Specifically, it utilizes Veno´s state differentiator to distinguish congestion losses and non-congestion losses during transmission. By discounting the impact of those non-congestion losses on the throughput calculation, it can effectively alleviate the throughput degradation caused by wireless links. The simulation results have shown that, our proposal can achieve throughput improvement up to 70% as compared to the original TFRC. Meanwhile, it maintains other merits of the original TFRC, such as sending rate smoothness, fairness, and TCP-friendliness.