Multi-platform performance evaluation of digital fountain based transport

One of the key questions for future networks is how to efficiently transfer data traffic generated by versatile applications in heterogeneous and fast changing environments. The lesson learned from the history of the Internet is that congestion control performed by TCP can be a solution. However, due to the limitations of TCP versions a novel paradigm applying fountain code based transfer seems to be a promising alternative. In this paper we address this idea by investigating our recently developed transport protocol called Digital Fountain based Communication Protocol (DFCP). The operation of DFCP is validated on three different testing platforms including our laboratory testbed, the Emulab network emulation environment and the ns-2 network simulator. We present and discuss the results of a comprehensive performance evaluation study obtained on multiple platforms by comparing DFCP to widely used TCP versions, as well as using various network topologies and settings. The results point out that digital fountain based transport has many advantages over traditional TCP.