A Survey of Deployment Information of Delay-based TCP Congestion Avoidance Algorithm for Transmitting Multimedia Data

Multimedia traffic comprises a significant part of the total Internet traffic. Due to the real-time nature of the multimedia traffic, low queuing delay is critical to many multimedia applications. This requirement makes delay-based TCP congestion avoidance algorithms (or delay-based TCP algorithms for short) a good choice to transmit multimedia data, since they can help keep a low queuing delay in the Internet. However, the Internet traffic is controlled by heterogeneous TCP algorithms and many of them are non-delay-based. Thus, the effort made by the delay-based TCP algorithms to reduce the queuing delay is often offset by the non-delay-based TCP algorithms. Indeed, unless a significant part of the total Internet traffic is controlled by the delay-based TCP algorithms, we probably won’t see a big improvement in terms of the queuing delay. This observation motivates us to develop a method to differentiate between the delay-based and the non-delay-based TCP algorithms and use it to investigate the deployment information of the delay-based TCP algorithms on the web servers in the Internet. Our purpose is to gain a preliminary understanding about the amount of the Internet traffic controlled by the delay-based TCP algorithms, and hence the impact of the delay-based TCP algorithms on the Internet queuing delay. Such information is valuable for those people who plan to use the delay-based TCP algorithms to transmit their multimedia data