Subject: RFC 4828 on TCP Friendly Rate Control (TFRC): The Small-Packet (SP) Variant

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 11:32:17 -0700

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        RFC 4828

        Title:      TCP Friendly Rate Control (TFRC): 
                    The Small-Packet (SP) Variant 
        Author:     S. Floyd, E. Kohler
        Status:     Experimental
        Date:       April 2007
        Mailbox:    [email-masked], 
                    [email-masked]
        Pages:      46
        Characters: 116808
        Updates/Obsoletes/SeeAlso:   None

        I-D Tag:    draft-ietf-dccp-tfrc-voip-07.txt

        URL:        http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4828.txt

This document proposes a mechanism for further experimentation, but
not for widespread deployment at this time in the global Internet.

TCP-Friendly Rate Control (TFRC) is a congestion control mechanism
for unicast flows operating in a best-effort Internet environment
(RFC 3448).  TFRC was intended for applications that use a fixed
packet size, and was designed to be reasonably fair when competing
for bandwidth with TCP connections using the same packet size.  This
document proposes TFRC-SP, a Small-Packet (SP) variant of TFRC, that
is designed for applications that send small packets.  The design
goal for TFRC-SP is to achieve the same bandwidth in bps (bits per
second) as a TCP flow using packets of up to 1500 bytes.  TFRC-SP
enforces a minimum interval of 10 ms between data packets to
prevent a single flow from sending small packets arbitrarily
frequently.

Flows using TFRC-SP compete reasonably fairly with large-packet TCP
and TFRC flows in environments where large-packet flows and
small-packet flows experience similar packet drop rates.  However, in
environments where small-packet flows experience lower packet drop
rates than large-packet flows (e.g., with Drop-Tail queues in units
of bytes), TFRC-SP can receive considerably more than its share of
the bandwidth.  This memo defines an Experimental Protocol for the 
Internet community.

This document is a product of the Datagram Congestion Control Protocol
Working Group of the IETF.

EXPERIMENTAL: This memo defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet 
community. It does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. 
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