TCP congestion control mechanisms for achieving predictable throughput using inline network measurement

Recently, real-time media delivery services such as video streaming and VoIP have rapidly become popular. For these applications requiring high-level QoS guarantee, our research group has proposed a transport-layer approach to provide predictable throughput for upper-layer applications. In the present paper, we propose a congestion control mechanism of TCP for achieving predictable throughput. It does not mean we can guarantee the throughput, while we can provide the throughput required by an upper-layer application at high probability when network congestion level is not so high by using the inline network measurement technique for available bandwidth of the network path. We present the evaluation results for the proposed mechanism obtained in simulation and implementation experiments, and confirm that the proposed mechanism can assure a TCP throughput if the required bandwidth is not so high compared to the physical bandwidth, even when other ordinary TCP (e.g., TCP Reno) connections occupy the link.