Extending the Combined Model for Congestion Control to Heterogeneous Networks

TCP and UDP are the dominant transport protocols on the Internet. The first one is used for reliable transport, while the second one for multimedia applications. Their behavior is quite different, which makes coexistence a challenge. Namely, TCP is responsive to potential network problems, such as congestion, while UDP completely ignores it. The need to come up with a protocol that somehow extracts the "good" attributes of both TCP and UDP, and leaves out the less favorable to the Internet, has proved to be a challenging research venue. Rather then going for an "entirely" new protocol, our objectives have been to keep TCP as is, while using the mobile agent paradigm for UDP control. The proposed solution termed as Combined Model for Congestion Control (CM4CC) has been limited to wired networks. Today, the Internet is an aggregation of both wired and wireless infrastructures; the article focuses on the CM4CC extension in heterogeneous networks.