TCP Limit: A Streaming Friendly Transport Protocol

In this paper we propose a simple enhancement to TCP (called TCP Limit) which significantly improves the utilization, delay, and jitter characteristics of standard TCP versions. TCP Limit requires only a small sender-side modification and can be applied on top of any TCP versions. Its main advantage is that it can be multiplexed with non-elastic streaming traffic without any router or protocol support. TCP Limit avoids the undesired effect of oscillation and keeps the delay and jitter as low as possible; so it does not ruin the performance of streaming applications. In the paper we present the initial performance evaluation of the proposed TCP Limit carried out by simulation and measurement. Analytical calculations are also included.