Improved WWW multimedia transmission performance in HTTP/TCP over ATM networks

Transmission control protocol/Internet protocol (TCP/IP) is the de facto standard of the networking world. It dynamically adjusts routing of packets to accommodate failures in channels and allows construction of very large networks with little central management. But IP packets are based on the datagram model and are not really suited to real-time traffic. In order to overcome the drawbacks, a new network technology, ATM, is proposed. ATM provides quality of service (QOS) guarantees for various classes of applications and in-order delivery of packets via connection oriented virtual circuits. Unfortunately, when ATM is to be internetworked with the existing network infrastructure, some special signaling, addressing and routing protocols are needed. IP over ATM is one of the methods proposed by IETF. It allows existing TCP/IP applications to run on ATM end-stations and ATM networks to interconnect with legacy LAN/WAN technologies. But the performance of TCP/IP over ATM leaves something to be desired. Partial packet discard (PPD) and early packet discard (EPD) are two schemes to improve its performance. This paper proposes a "selective packet retransmission" scheme for improving HTTP/TCP performance when transmitting through ATM networks. In selective packet retransmission, we take advantage of the property of humans' perception tolerance for errors to determine whether to retransmit a corrupted TCP segment or not. For lossable data, such as images, when an error occurs because of cell losses, it will not be retransmitted. The simulations show that, for the same buffer size and traffic load, selective packet retransmission performs better than PPD, EPD, and plain TCP over ATM.