Data transfer paradigms for future networks: Fountain coding or congestion control?

The research history of congestion control protocols has unveiled that it is difficult to find an optimal solution, which meets all the challenges of the evolving Internet. As an alternative paradigm recent studies suggest replacing congestion control with erasure coding techniques. In this paper we present a performance study of this approach comparing it with TCP based solutions. In order to investigate the new paradigm in details and also in practice, we have developed and implemented a novel transport protocol (Digital Fountain based Communication Protocol, DFCP) where an efficient digital fountain based erasure coding scheme plays the role of correcting packet loss. We present some analytical and simulation results together with our first performance comparisons in a testbed environment.