Optimization of TFRC Loss History Initialization

This letter deals with the initialization of the loss history structure in the TFRC (TCP-friendly rate control) mechanism. This initialization occurs after the detection of the first loss event after every slowstart phase. The loss history is crucial for the algorithm since it returns the packet loss rate estimation. This estimation is used in the TFRC equation to compute the sending rate. In this letter, we propose a new method to compute the packet loss rate which is more computationally efficient and remains as accurate as the classical commonly used method. The motivation of this work is to reduce the computation time and formulate a unified computation scheme. This method is based on the Newton's algorithm issued from numerical analysis of the TCP throughput equation. This proposal is evaluated analytically and the results show a significant improvement in terms of the computation time