TFRC Veno: An Enhancement of TCP Friendly Rate Control over Wired/Wireless Networks

TFRC is a TCP-friendly rate control protocol based on TCP Reno's throughput equation. It is designed to provide optimal service for unicast multimedia flow operating in the wired Internet environment. However, in wireless networks, TFRC, same as TCP Reno, suffers significant performance degradation. In this paper, we propose to make use of a more advanced equation to enhance TFRC over wireless networks. This new equation is directly derived from the modeling of the wireless TCP rather than the wired TCP. After incorporating this equation into TFRC, two achievements are obtained: 1) this enhanced TFRC has a significant throughput improvement; it is shown that in wireless networks with 10% loss rate, it can obtain 300% improvement over the original TFRC; 2) this enhanced TFRC inherits the desirable features of TFRC, namely good fairness, nice TCP-friendliness and smoothness of sending rate. The extensive experiments, including simulation and live Internet measurements, validate our proposed scheme. Moreover, our scheme only needs to modify the sender-side protocol of TFRC while the receiver-side or intermediate node protocol stack remains intact.