Scalable Performance Signalling and Congestion Avoidance

This book answers a question which came about while the author was work- ing on his diploma thesis [1]: would it be better to ask for the available band- width instead of probing the network (like TCP does)? The diploma thesis was concerned with long-distance musical interaction ('NetMusic'). This is a very peculiar application: only a small amount of bandwidth may be necessary, but timely delivery and reduced loss are very important. Back then, these require- ments led to a thorough investigation of existing telecommunication network mechanisms, but a satisfactory answer to the question could not be found. Simply put, the answer is 'yes' - this work describes a mechanism which indeed enables an application to 'ask for the available bandwidth'. This obvi- ously does not only concern online musical collaboration any longer. Among others, the mechanism yields the following advantages over existing alterna- tives: * good throughput while maintaining close to zero loss and a small bottleneck queue length * usefulness for streaming media applications due to a very smooth rate * feasibility for satellite and wireless links * high scalability Additionally, a reusable framework for future applications that need to 'ask the network' for certain performance data was developed.