Contact: Milan Vojnovic
Site: An Internet Measurement Study: Is TCP Friendly Rate Control really Friendly
TCP Friendly Rate Control (TFRC) [1] is a protocol designed to control the send rate of some Internet sources (primarily, multimedia streaming applications). One aim of such protocols is to assure the long-run throughput is not larger than TCP would attain under the same network operating conditions. Apart from the “TCP-friendliness” requirement, control of Internet streaming applications is important to prevent network overloading, which ultimately may lead to network congestion collapse.
Our analysis in [2] and [3] tells us under what conditions we may expect controls like TFRC to be friendly, and when even excessively so.
The goal of the project is to conduct Internet measurements and confront some of our analytically obtained friendliness conditions in the real Internet. Measurements will be done end-to-end between diversely located hosts across US, Europe, and likely some other continents. The measuring setup will require installing the existing TFRC experimental implementation, some programming for data collection in TFRC implementation C code, and editing some existing Perl scripts. The final step is to perform statistical analysis of the collected data and upon this answer our original question.
[1] M. Handley, J. Padhye, S. Floyd, and J. Widmer, “TCP Friendly Rate Control (TFRC) Protocol Specification,” IETF Internet-draft, July 2001, http://www.icir.org/tfrc
[2] M. Vojnovic and J.-Y. Le Boudec, “On the Long-Run Behavior of Equation-Based Rate Control,” in Proc. of ACM Sigcomm 2002, Pittsburgh, PA, August 19-23, 2002. http://dscwww.epfl.ch/EN/publications/documents/tr02_006.pdf
[3] M. Vojnovic and J.-Y. Le Boudec, “Some Observations on Equation-Based Rate Control,” in Proc. of ITC-17, Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, December 2001. http://icapeople.epfl.ch/vojnovic/pubs/itc17ebrc.pdf
Benefits: Involvement and contribution to an active area of Internet research.
Domain: Network performance analysis; Protocol design and implementation