Measurement of buffer requirement trends for real time traffic over TCP

Conceptionally the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) should be well-suited for real-time applications, e.g., for Voice over IP (VoIP). However, many such applications, e.g., Skype, use the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) either as a primary protocol or as a backup protocol when UDP is blocked, despite TCP's flow control-related data delays. This paper proposes a technique for the estimation of the application buffer requirements of such TCP-based applications and the amount of data congestion in real-time TCP data streams. We apply this technique to data collected from a global network exchanging synthetic real-time traffic over TCP. Our results show that the buffering requirements vary widely with time and path but can be substantial in many cases.