Protocol mechanisms for reliable transmission and flow control on multimedia highways

Efficient mechanisms for reliable transmission and flow control are required to provide enhanced throughput guarantee and network utilization on multimedia highways. An overview of high delay and multimedia transport protocol mechanisms with special focus on TCP and XTPX is given. Different retransmission strategies, dynamical rate control as well as window size adjustment and flow control techniques at connection establishment and error recovery are discussed and illustrated by simulation results and measurements for TCP and XTPX. For high delay networks and multimedia applications, we study and demonstrate the effect of go-back-N, selective retransmission, Slowstart, congestion avoidance of TCP as well as selectable retransmission techniques and rate based flow control of XTPX.