BATS: a high-performance transport system for broadband applications

Broadband applications require high-performance networking facilities and the guarantee of quality of service (QOS). Existing transport protocols are incapable of providing QOS. Should a transport entity result in insufficient processing bandwidth, the layer becomes a performance bottleneck and can no longer guarantee QOS. In addition, the problem of how transfer rates can be determined in the implementation of non-window-based flow control mechanisms has been left unexplored. This paper presents a transport system prototype, called the Broadband Application Transport System (BATS), conducted over the user datagram protocol platform. It supports four classes of applications with different time sensitivity, bit rates, and connection types. In an effort to guarantee QOS, BATS employs a resource management scheme and a rate-based flow control protocol. The resource manager may cause longer delays for time-insensitive applications and the blocking of connections for time-sensitive applications. Moreover, for rate-based flow control, the transfer rate for each application class can be accurately determined. Consequently, compared with TB, BATS achieves superior performance in terms of end-to-end transfer delay and delay jitter for all application classes under various system loads