Design and validation of a reliable rate based transport protocol: The Chameleon protocol

TFRC protocol has not been designed to enable reliability. Indeed, the birth of TFRC results from the need of a congestion controlled and realtime transport protocol in order to carry multimedia traffic. Historically, and following the anarchical deployment of congestion control mechanisms implemented on top of UDP protocol, the IETF decided to standardize such protocol in order to provide to multimedia applications developers a framework for their applications. In this paper, we propose to design a reliable rate-based transport protocol based on TFRC. This design is motivated by finding an alternative to TCP where its oscillating behaviour is known to be counterproductive over certain networks such as VANET. However, we found interesting results partly inherited from the smooth behaviour of TFRC in the context of wired networks. In particular, we show that TFRC can realize shorter data transfer compare to TCP over a complex and realistic topology. We firstly detail and fully benchmark our protocol in order to verify that our resulting prototype inherits from the good properties of TFRC in terms of TCP-friendliness. As a second contribution, we also propose a ns-2 implementation for testing purpose to the networking community. Following these preliminary tests, we drive a set of non-exhaustive experiments to illustrate some interesting behaviour of this protocol in the context of wired networks.