A Simulation Based Performance Evaluation of

PRTP is proposed to address the need of a transport service that is more suitable for applications with soft real-time requirements, e.g., video broadcasting. It is an exten-sion for partial reliability to TCP. The main idea behind PRTP is to exploit the fact that many soft real-time applications tolerate a limited amount of packet loss. In particular, PRTP enables an application to trade some of the reliability offered by TCP for im-proved throughput and interarrival jitter. This paper describes the design of PRTP and gives a detailed description of a simulation based performance evaluation. The perfor-mance evaluation involved the performance of PRTP compared to TCP in long- as well as in short-lived connections and showed that PRTP probably would give significant improvements in performance, both in terms of throughput and interarrival jitter, for a wide range of applications. The performance evaluation also suggested that PRTP is not TCP-friendly and altogether fair against competing flows and thus is not suitable for use in an environment where the main reason for packet loss is congestion, e.g., in a fixed Internet environment. We believe, however, that PRTP could be a viable alternative fo