Loss sharing with TTL routing

The boom in new streaming media applications in the recent past calls for innovative strategies that can support both data and media over the same global IP based Internet in a fair and efficient manner. Several solutions have already been proposed to control the rate of media traffic and to maintain fairness among the heterogeneous traffic flows. We propose a mechanism that solves many of the problems associated with the earlier schemes. A new concept, called "loss sharing", is introduced for \´media rate control\´ and \´maintenance of fairness\´. We show that these two objectives are automatically achieved as desirable side-effects of the recently proposed "TTL routing algorithm". This algorithm adopts a new interpretation of the TTL (time-to-live) field of the IP header. It is shown that rate control by "TTL routing" has certain other desirable features.