Symbiotic rate adaptation for time sensitive elastic traffic with interactive transport

Interactivity in the transport protocol can greatly benefit transport friendly applications generating streaming traffic. Recently we have developed iTCP, which can provide event notification to the subscriber of its communication service. This is operationally state equivalent to the conventional TCP except applications can optionally subscribe, receive, and in real-time react to selected local end-point events. This simple extension opens the horizon for a spectrum of smart application level solutions to be realized for many of the current hard problems. In this paper we demonstrate a new paradigm of congestion management for time sensitive elastic traffic. Based on the transport layer feedback, a rate adaptation mechanism kicks in. This mechanism provides a generation rate control with guaranteed TCP buffer delay. We have recently implemented and tested the real system on the Active Network (ABone) testbed for video streaming to worldwide sites. In this paper we share the performance of this system and report observed dramatic improvements in time-bounded streaming traffic.