Burst control

In multipurpose, multiservice network, real-time data (e.g. video over RTP) are transmitted in the same link with bulk data (e.g. ftp over TCP). Although real-time transmission usually doesn´t occupy the whole link capacity, competing TCP stream typically collapses and achieves significantly lower throughput. TCP-tolerance is a behaviour of a real-time transport protocol, which allows TCP to utilize bandwidth unoccupied by the realtime transmission. In the paper burst control mechanism for TCP-tolerant transmission is proposed. The mechanism assures avoidance of TCP congestion collapse when competing with real-time transinission, but does not allow for transmission rate reduction when congestions appear. The congestion avoidance itself should be performed using one of the typical architectures of congestion avoidance for real-time transmission (e.g. receiver-driven layered multicast). Simulational analysis shows, that burst control effective protects real-time characteristics of the inelastic, multimedia traffic and allows TCP to utilize bandwidth unoccupied by real-time multimedia transmission much better than without burst control.