Abstract:

[Objective] The internet has facilitated the introduction of a huge number of new applications due to the fast development of network communication technologies and applications. These applications’ performance needs have gotten increasingly specific and differentiated. Many applications can tolerate a certain degree of data loss, such as real-time streaming media applications. However, traditional generic network transmission protocols do not provide flexible reliability assurance services. [Methods] This paper proposes a new generic Differentiated Reliable Transmission Control Protocol (DRTP), which aims to provide differentiated and deterministic reliability guarantees for upper-layer applications and ensure transmission efficiency. [Results] This paper focuses on the DRTP protocol’s retransmission mechanism, which mainly minimizes the triggering of timeout retransmission and decreases unnecessary data retransmission times when the existing transmission reliability fulfills the application reliability requirements. In this paper, the simulation experiment is conducted on NS-3, and the mechanism is developed and tested on the Linux kernel to validate its transmission impact in this work. [Conclusions] The results of the experiments reveal that, when compared with TCP, this approach may not only assure the application reliability requirements but also offer greater transmission throughput on a network link with a specific degree of packet loss rate.

Key words: transport protocols, retransmission mechanism, differentiated reliable transmission, partially reliable transmission, TCP