Performance evaluation of DCCP: A focus on smoothness and TCP-friendliness

Recent years have seen dramatic increases of the use of multimedia applications on the Internet, which typically either lack congestion control or use proprietary congestion control mechanisms. This can easily cause congestion collapse or compatibility problems. Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (Dccp) fills the gap betweenUdp andTcp, featuring congestion control rather than reliability for packet-switched rich content delivery with high degree of flexibility. We present aDccp model designed and implemented withOpnet Modeler, and the experiments and evaluation focused on largely the smoothness of the data rates, and the fairness between concurrentDccp flows andTcp flows. We foundDccp-ccid3 demonstrates stable data rates under different scenarios, and the fairness betweenDccp andTcp is only achieved under certain conditions. We also validated that the throughput ofDccp-Ccid3 is proportional to the average packet size, and relatively fixed packet size is critical for the optimal operation ofDccp. Problems in the slow start phase and insufficient receiver buffer size were identified and we hereby proposed solutions on this.