Designing incentive compatible protocols for background data transfers

We consider the design of transport protocols for background transfers with the aim of reducing the download delays of interactive (non-background) flows which share the same links. We demonstrate that Lower than Best Effort (LBE) protocols suffer from bandwidth starvation, a fact which not only creates adoption disincentives but can have a harmful effect on the interactive flows as well. Instead we propose a simple access control policy which limits the maximum number of simultaneously transmitting background flows. This maximum limit is dynamically adjusted in order to prevent bandwidth starvation thus eliminating the disincentives present in LBE protocols. Through simulations we show that our policy creates lower transfer delay for the interactive flows, as compared to that under LEDBAT [6] and TCP-LP [8] LBE protocols.