Measured performance of TCP friendly rate control protocol over a 2.5G network

As the General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) enters the European market, new services based on multimedia delivery are expected to represent a large amount of traffic in addition to traditional voice flows. Multimedia streaming applications generally require a rate control mechanism, to adapt the sending rate automatically to the time varying channel state. Rate control protocols provided with multimedia streaming stacks should be TCP-friendly, in order to avoid starvation of TCP traffic. The TCP friendly rate control (TFRC) protocol, currently under review by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), has been proposed as a rate control process and has been investigated in the field of multimedia transmission over wired packet-switched networks. We have investigated the TFRC protocol over a real GPRS network and report on the many measurements conducted in order to evaluate its performance over a 2.5G network.