Coded rate control protocol (C-RCP) for lossy channels

Among transport layer protocols Nandita et al, in their work has shown that rate control protocol (RCP) is superior in its performance as compared to Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and explicit control protocol (XCP), and emulates processor sharing in a much better way. A lot of work has been done for the improvement of RCP but the performance improvement for lossy networks is still an open issue. The main objective of RCP is to achieve ideal processor sharing and Nandita et al have shown that RCP meets this goal irrespective of the flow sizes. In this work we make use of this property and provide a scheme that improves RCP's performance for lossy channels. Our scheme makes use of erasre coding to ensure end-to-end reliability for lossy links, using Luby Transform (LT). We propose a new strategy for incorporating erasure coding with rate control protocol (RCP). Our scheme works by adjusting the rate of transmission depending on the packet erasure rate (PER) feedback from routers, therefore it achieves the reliability on top of the congestion control at transport layer, thus it eliminates need of a separate erasure correction scheme at link layer. Simulation results show that RCP's performance over lossy links improves by using proposed methodology. We observe that using erasure coding we can achieve same throughput for lossy links, as that of lossless links, without having significant effect on the AFCT of the flows.