Enhanced TCP-friendly rate control for supporting video traffic over internet

Video traffic nowadays forms the majority of traffic over the Internet, and is predicted to be the most prevailing traffic type in the coming few years. TCP-Friendly Rate Control (TFRC) is one of the most promising end-to-end congestion control protocols that is intended for unicast playback of Internet streaming applications. This paper presents a new TCP-Friendly congestion control protocol, called Enhanced TCP-Friendly Rate Control (ETFRC), for supporting real time video traffic over the Internet. The proposed protocol is developed by adjusting the sending rate, at the sender side, dynamically based on the current state of the network, and the current state of the receiver. In other words, ETFRC embodies a new algorithm to tune (increase or decrease) the sending rate, at the sender side, according to the difference between the calculated rate by the sender and the reported rate from the receiver side. The performance of the proposed ETFRC protocol is evaluated using the network simulator ns-2 considering different scenarios. In these scenarios, simulated video traffic from the Evalvid framework is sent over the designed topology and different performance parameters are measured and compared with that obtained by applying the original TFRC protocol. The simulation results show that ETFRC performance surpassed TFRC in terms of throughput, jitter, and packet loss.