A Simulation Based Performance Analysis of a TCP Extension for Best-Effort Multimedia Applications

Since TCP is considered unsuitable for the majority of the emerging multimedia applications, these applications primarily use UDP transport together with proprietary con-gestion control schemes that have better jitter and through-put characteristics. A common problem with these con-gestion control schemes is that they often exhibit a TCP-unfriendly and unfair behavior. As the number of applica-tions that uses this kind of schemes increases, this could become a serious threat to the stability and performance of the Internet. In an attempt to make TCP a viable alterna-tive to some best-effort multimedia applications, we have proposed an extension to TCP — PRTP-ECN. The perfor-mance of PRTP-ECN has been compared with TCP in an extensive factorial simulation experiment. This paper gives a detailed description of this simulation experiment with an emphasis on its statistical design and analysis. The analy-sis of the experiment includes, among other things, a series of ANOVA tests. These tests indicate that PRTP-ECN gives significant reductions in average interarrival jitter, while at the same time leads to improvements in average through-put and goodput, and better link utilization. In addition, the analysis suggests that PRTP-ECN is almost as fair as TCP and exhibits a TCP-friendly behavior. 1