TFRC is a transport protocol specifically designed to carry multimedia streams. TFRC does not enable a reliable and in order data delivery services. However the mechanism is designed to be friendly with TCP flows and thus, enables a control congestion algorithm. This congestion control relies in a feedback mechanism allowing receivers to communicate to the senders an experienced drop rate. Several studies attempted to adapt TFRC to a wide range of network conditions and topologies. Although the current TFRC RFC writes that there is little gain from sending a large number of feedback messages per RTT, recent studies have shown that in long-delay contexts, such as satellite-based networks, the performance of TFRC can be greatly improved by increasing the feedback frequency. Nevertheless, currently it is not clear how and why this increase may improve the performance of TFRC. Therefore, in this paper, we aim at understanding the impact that multiple feedback per RTT may have (i) on the key parameters of TFRC (RTT, drop rate, and sending rate) and (ii) on the network parameters (reactiveness and link utilization).We also provide a detailed description of the micro-mechanisms at the origin of the improvements of the TFRC behaviour when multiple feedback per RTT are delivered, and determine the context where such feedback frequencies should be applied.
展开▼
