A simulation based performance analysis of a TCP extension for best-effort multimedia applications

Abstract

Since TCP is considered unsuitable for the majority of the emerging multimedia applications, these applications primarily use UDP transport together with proprietary congestion control schemes that have better jitter and throughput characteristics. A common problem with these congestion control schemes is that they often exhibit a TCP-unfriendly and unfair behavior As the number of applications that uses this kind of schemes increases, this could become a serious threat to the stability and performance of the Internet. In an attempt to make TCP a viable alternative to some best-effort multimedia applications, we have proposed an extension to TCP - PRTP-ECN. The performance of PRTP-ECN has been compared with TCP in an extensive factorial simulation experiment. This paper gives a detailed description of this simulation experiment with an emphasis on its statistical design and analysis. The analysis of the experiment includes, among other things, a series of ANOVA tests. These tests indicate that PRTP-ECN gives significant reductions in average inter arrival jitter while at the same time leads to improvements in average throughput and goodput, and better link utilization. In addition, the analysis suggests that PRTP-ECN is almost as fair as TCP and exhibits a TCP-friendly behavior.