Question

TCP congestion control was primarily designed for elastic applications like web-browsing or email, which are delay agnostic. At steady state, TCP congestion window wildly fluctuates to resemble a “saw tooth” pattern. Given that streaming media is the dominant traffic on the Internet today, how should the congestion window behave to better cater to video? Streaming media is not elastic: it is very sensitive to delay fluctuations.

Answer 1

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For serving multimedia in good quality, multipath transmission is required. Multipath transmission increases the rate of transmission and packet loss can also be avoided. In this the congestion window of the TCP also plays a role. What happens is that the status of the network is monitored and the subflow which was a reason for the packet loss is adjusted accordingly. The congestion window of every subflow of TCP is adjusted as per the Round Trip Time(RTT). In case if there is a packet loss while streaming media then TCP will increase the size of the congestion window linearly. This might take certain time due to which multipath is used which can reduce the variation in the rate of transmission.

So the congestion window is increased so that it reaches to the maximum and using multipath it takes lesser time to reach the maximum size as the packet loss rate is reduced.

If this was supposed to be done in any other way or there is still any query then please mention it in the comment section otherwise please upvote.