TCP friendly protocols for media streams over heterogeneous wired–wireless networks

The growing need for Internet friendly streaming protocols prompted us to develop IFTP (Internet Friendly Transport Protocol). IFTP is a protocol with an inherent rate-based flow control mechanism designed to emulate TCP’s window-based flow control mechanism. In this paper, we present two proposals to improve the performance of IFTP in networks with wireless links. The first is IFTP-W, which specifies an error-sensitive section. Bit errors not occurring in this section are ignored. The second is IFTPV, which distinguishes between losses due to congestion and those due to the wireless link. In this paper, we present the performance of IFTP-W with varying error-sensitive section lengths on networks with varying link qualities. We also analyze the performance of IFTPV in extensive scenarios with various network conditions. The results show that both proposals maintain the TCP-friendliness and fairness properties, but perform better than IFTP on wireless networks.