IFTP-W: A TCPFriendly Protocol for Multimedia Applications over Wireless Networks

Recent growth in the use of multimedia applications on wireless networks is calling for the development of a protocol that is both TCP-friendly and capable of conforming to the constraints of wireless networks. This paper presents IFTP-W, an end-to-end congestion control protocol we designed to meet both requirements. IFTP-W is a TCP-friendly protocol for media streams that allows for applications to choose a section of a packet to be verified by a checksum, with the remaining portion deemed error-insensitive and not checked for corrupted bits. One corrupted bit in a video or audio stream may cause a discolored pixel or distorted millisecond of audio; however, in many codecs, receiving the partially damaged packet results in better overall performance than dropping the packet. IFTP-W allows a greater percentage of packets to be transmitted, resulting in a higher goodput and throughput and hence improved performance over wireless networks suffering high bit error rates