A new TCP congestion control algorithm for media streaming

This paper proposes a new TCP congestion control algorithm (TCP-MS) that works better with media streaming applications in terms of network bandwidth utilization, fairness and traffic smoothness. Different from traditional TCP congestion control algorithms that estimates congestion by packet loss or queuing delay, TCP-MS estimates congestion by packet acknowledgement speed and adjusts window per round trip time. This provides a more accurate and less oscillatory congestion window changes, therefore improves network bandwidth utilization and traffic smoothness. We compare our algorithm with typical loss-based TCP-Reno and delay-based TCP-Vegas, and the results show that TCP-MS is an ideal transport protocol for streaming videos.