Living with congestion: Digital Fountain based Communication Protocol

In this paper, we propose a networking paradigm built upon a fountain code based data transfer mechanism. We advocate that, instead of controlling the congestion as it is applied in recent Internet by the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), we can utilize congestion and neglect control algorithms with all of their drawbacks. We present our envisioned network architecture relying on a novel transport protocol called Digital Fountain based Communication Protocol (DFCP) and highlight some potential application areas. We have implemented DFCP in the Linux kernel and we provide its validation results gained from three different testing platforms including our laboratory testbed, the Emulab network emulation environment and the ns-2 network simulator. Moreover, we present and discuss a comprehensive performance evaluation of DFCP in comparison with widely used TCP versions.