[e2e] TFRC vs UDP

[Dado Colussi]

Syed Faisal Hasan wrote:
> 
> To whom it may concern,
> 
> TFRC was designed for use by the Continuous Media (CM) applications. But 
> why will a CM application which is performing well using UDP, use TFRC 
> if there is performance gap (more latency, less number of packets 
> transmitted in the same time, high rate fluctuations in the beginning) 
> betwen UDP and TFRC ? May be thats the reason we haven't seen any 
> applicatons using TFRC. On the other hand there is no (I haven't found) 
> research which analyzes the performance difference between UDP and TFRC. 
> It is clear that TFRC will not perform exactly like UDP ( due to TFRC's 
> friendliness with TCP), but how much can we expect from TFRC?


Hi Syed,

the motivation is that although your application would work fine and you 
(a single person in a society) would have a good welfare using UDP, it 
is your fellow citizens that would potentially suffer from your actions. 
The network resource should be distributed fairly - whatever it means. 
If we all started to disregard other users, the network might stop 
working properly - equivalent to anarchy in a society. Mechanisms are 
needed to guarantee fair distribution of the resource. TFRC attempts to 
provide mechanisms to distribute the bandwidth resource in the same way 
TCP does.

I think performance issues depend more on competing TCP flows and the 
network than on the TFRC control algorithm.


Cheers, Dado