Performance of early retransmission scheme in streaming media

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new variant of TCP with an early retransmission scheme as an enhancement to make it more suitable for streaming media. We call this new protocol TCP-ER. We performed extensive ns2 simulations to show that: 1) The early retransmission scheme can considerably reduce the number of retransmission timeouts and packet delay jitter in a variety of network environments. 2) TCP-ER has a higher throughput in severely congested network conditions whereas stays relatively fair with typical TCP implementations(specifically TCP-SACK) as congestion gets alleviated. 3) Under same network conditions, constrained streaming over TCP-ER has a considerably lower number of late packets than its normal TCP counterpart.