DCCP partial reliability extension with sequence number compensation

Datagram congestion control protocol (DCCP), possessing congestion control and unreliable transmission, specially suits real-time multimedia applications. Nevertheless, losses of key packets will cause a substantial decline on quality of services (QoS) in some applications. This paper proposes a DCCP partial reliability extension (PR-DCCP) that can retransmit lost packets as needed. Since DCCP uses an incremental sequence number, the retransmitted packets cannot utilize their original sequence number. To solve this problem, PR-DCCP adopts sequence number compensation, which appends an offset to the retransmitted packet; thus the receiver can use the sequence number of this retransmitted packet and the attached offset so as to re-obtain the original sequence number. The simulation uses two performance metrics: decodable frame ratio (DFR) representing QoS, and useless data received ratio (UDRR) representing the bandwidth waste. These are used to evaluate different transport protocols, namely, PR-DCCP, DCCP, SCTP, TCP, and UDP. Simulation results show that PR-DCCP has the better DFR and UDRR than other transport protocols in almost all cases. For various movies, a DFR of PR-DCCP is 1.2–12.4% higher than that of DCCP; while UDRR is lower by 73.2–85.1%. Furthermore, two reliability policies to determine which packets require reliability are investigated. Finally, the comparisons between PR-DCCP and PR-SCTP are examined.