Receiver-driven bandwidth sharing for TCP

Applications using TCP, such as Web-browsers, ftp, and various P2P programs, dominate most of the Internet traffic today. In many cases the last-hop access links are bottlenecks due to their limited bandwidth capability with users running many simultaneous network applications. Standard TCP shares bottleneck link capacity according to connection round-trip time (RTT), and may result in a bandwidth partition which does not necessarily coincide with the user's desires. We present a receiver-based control system for allocating bandwidth among TCP flows according to user preferences. Our system does not require any changes to network infrastructure, and works with standard TCP senders. NS-2 simulations, as well as actual Internet experiments, show that our system achieves desired bandwidth allocation in a wide variety of scenarios including interfering cross-traffic. We also demonstrate the viability of our system in multimedia streaming applications over TCP.