CAREER: Stochastic TCP Friendliness: Exploring the Design Space of TCP-Friendly Traffic Control in the Best-Effort Internet

TCP友好性是近年来提出的一个基本设计原则，用于尽力而为型Internet的流量控制。当前TCP友好性的概念非常适合于能够使其速率适应网络拥塞的应用。然而，互联网流量的一个重要部分是多媒体流业务，它固有地具有有限的速率适应性。因此，目前TCP友好的概念大大限制了多媒体流的流量控制协议的设计空间。本项目的目标是开发随机TCP友好作为尽力而为互联网中流量控制的新的基本设计原则，主要研究内容包括以下两个方面：1）开发一个随机TCP友好性框架来定性地测量流量控制协议对TCP性能的统计影响，并比较两种不同协议的统计影响; 2）设计和评估一类新的用于多媒体流的随机TCP友好的业务控制协议，与现有的TCP友好协议相比，其目的是显著提高TCP和UDP的性能。随机TCP-友好性作为一个新的基本设计原则，将使其他研究人员能够开发出许多其他新的协议，更好地适应他们的具体需求。这是将互联网从TCP用户主导的世界转变为不同用户共享的世界的重要一步。该项目还包括一个强大的教育部分，以吸引更多的本科生，并从事本科生和研究生的研究。

TCP friendliness has been proposed and used as a fundamental design principle for traffic control in the best-effort Internet in the last few years. The current notion of TCP friendliness is well suitable for applications that can adapt their rates to network congestion. However, a significant fraction of Internet traffic is multimedia streaming traffic, which inherently has limited rate adaptability. As a result, the current notion of TCP friendliness considerably restricts the design space of traffic control protocols for multimedia streaming.The goal of this project is to develop stochastic TCP-friendliness as a new fundamental design principle for traffic control in the best-effort Internet with the following two major research components: 1) developing a stochastic TCP-friendliness framework to qualitatively measure the statistical impact of a traffic control protocol on TCP performance, and to relatively compare the statistical impacts of two different protocols and 2) designing and evaluating a new class of stochastically TCP-friendly traffic control protocols for multimedia streaming, with the aim to considerably improve both TCP and UDP performance when compared with existing TCP-friendly protocols.Broader Impacts: Stochastic TCP-friendliness as a new fundamental design principle will enable other researchers to develop many other new protocols better tailored to their specific needs. It is an important step on the path to move the Internet from a world dominated by TCP users to a world shared among diverse users. This project also includes a strong education component to attract more undergraduate students, and to engage both undergraduate and graduate students into research.