On the Dynamic Behavior of Digital Fountain Based Communication

The volume of Internet traffic has been growing exponentially in the last years, and this trend is expected to intensify in the future. In typical backbone networks hundreds of thousands of flows, originated from different users and versatile applications, compete for the available resources. Such a heterogeneous mixture of traffic flows leads to a continuously changing environment, hence it is crucial to deeply understand the behavior of the underlying data transfer mechanisms regarding many features like stability, convergence and responsiveness. In this paper we study the characteristics of the recently proposed digital fountain based transport in dynamic network conditions, and carry out a comparison with the traditional approach relying on TCP´s congestion control.