Taxonomy and Survey of Retransmission Based Partially Reliable Transport Protocols

The mismatch between the services offered by the two standard transport protocols inthe Internet, TCP and UDP, and the services required by distributed multimedia applicationshas led to the development of a large number of partially reliable transportprotocols. That is, protocols which in terms of reliability places themselves betweenTCP and UDP. This paper presents a taxonomy for retransmission based, partially reliabletransport protocols, i.e., the subclass of partially reliable transport protocols thatperforms error recovery through retransmissions. The taxonomy comprises two classificationschemes: one that classifies retransmission based, partially reliable transportprotocols with respect to the reliability service they offer and one that classifies themwith respect to their error control scheme. The objective of our taxonomy is fourfold:to introduce a unified terminology; to provide a framework in which retransmissionbased, partially reliable transport protocols can be examined, compared, and contrasted;to make explicit the error control schemes used by these protocols; and, finally, to gainnew insights into these protocols and thereby suggest avenues for future research. Basedon our taxonomy, a survey was made of existing retransmission based, partially reliabletransport protocols. The survey shows how protocols are categorized according to ourtaxonomy, and exemplifies the majority of reliability services and error control schemesdetailed in our taxonomy