Congestion- aware TCP-friendly system for multimedia transmission based on UDP

Although most of the data traffic in Internet is HTTP-based, multimedia applications will soon dominate a large percentage of the traffic. These applications require satisfactory level of bandwidth as they normally have large datasets. Under the limitation of network bandwidth, multimedia traffic may become a source for congestion; particularly when UDP is used due to the absence of flow control or congestion control mechanisms in this protocol. Avoiding congestion can be done if arrival rate to gateways is maintained close to outgoing link capacity while maintain small queue lengths at the routers. This guarantees the availability of buffer capacity for successful buffering and consequent forwarding in case of temporary traffic upsurges which could otherwise cause buffer overflows and packet loss. This research work introduces a congestion-aware and friendly UDP-based multimedia system which can help to lessening congestion occurrence and improve network performance, principally in real-time environments. The evaluation results show that the proposed system helps in controlling congestion, reducing packet loss, increasing throughput, and providing improved network utilization.