TCP Using Adaptive FEC to Improve Throughput Performance in High-Latency Environments

Abstract

Packet losses significantly degrade TCP performance in high-latency environments. This is because TCP needs at least one roundtrip time (RTT) to recover lost packets. The recovery time will grow longer, especially in high-latency environments. TCP keeps transmission rate low while lost packets are recovered, thereby degrading throughput. To prevent this performance degradation, the number of retransmissions must be kept as low as possible. Therefore, we propose a scheme to apply a technology called "forward error correction" (FEC) to the entire TCP operation in order to improve throughput. Since simply applying FEC might not work effectively, three function, namely, controlling redundancy level and transmission rate, suppressing the return of duplicate ACKs, interleaving redundant packets, were devised. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme was demonstrated by simulation evaluations in high-latency environments.

Robust QUIC: Integrating Practical Coding in a Low Latency Transport Protocol

“…Later, Teshima et al proved in [33] that TCP-AFEC is not optimized for WLAN, proposing TCP-TFEC, an adaptive coding scheme that is more suitable for this technology. Sato et al extended TCP using the XOR coding scheme in [34]. They interleave generations, as was also suggested by [28], to mitigate burst losses and suppress duplicate ACK packets, thus allowing the FEC scheme to recover losses by itself.…”