Computer Sciences and Information Technology Essay - 3

Computer Sciences and Information Technology - Essay Example From the discussion it is clear that the growth in the use of the Internet has resulted in the use of more multimedia components, which require greater network bandwidth and consequently new network considerations. Audio and video as multimedia components require large bandwidth for transmission, and therefore pose a very real threat to overloading the connections and hampering other transmissions in the process. The quagmire has led to the development of a technique to prevent the risk of network collapse through overload. TCP is presently the most popular end-to-end congestion control mechanism in use. From TCP transmission properties emerged TCP friendly transmission, a connection standard that ensures the integrity and reliability of the network amidst heavy usage for multimedia streaming transmissions. TCP is the most common congestion control mechanism over the Internet.As the essay highlights  most of the Internet traffic is TCP based, consequently, the need for congestion c ontrol protocols to be TCP friendly is indisputable. Therefore, the rate at which non-TCP flows send data should be as close as possible to the TCP rates, otherwise called TCP friendly. In summary, TCP friendly flow of streaming media is one that makes similar utilization of the network resources as a standard non-conforming TCP under similar circumstances. Real-time multimedia applications streaming over the internet usually require special network circumstances to avoid congestion, as they may consume large amounts of bandwidth and cause packet drops. (Wang, Long, Cheng and Zhang, 2000). TCP friendly flows offer a means of congestion control, allowing applications to make better use of the network, and prevent the uneventful network malfunction that results in the crippling congestive collapse in computer networks. Usually, UDP traffic, mainly for the transmission of stored streaming audio over the Internet, consumes higher than normal bandwidth, which poses a risk to other networ k connections (Wang et al, 2000). As such, UDP connections result in congestion in the networks, and unfairly interference with initially responsive TCP connections due to the greater load on the network resources. Consequently, UDP, a non-TCP protocol needs to adaptation to bandwidth control mechanisms to make it TCP-friendly, and therefore make similar use of network resources as the more regular TCP connections. There exist a number of congestive friendly mechanisms. For instance, end-to-end TCP friendly congestion control mechanism reduces the load on the network when packet drops occur (Wang et al, 2000). The end-to-end congestion control is useful for both responsive and unresponsive network flows. However, end-to-end TCP friendly congestion control can only detect congestion through delays and loss in data packets, which means that their reaction is usually too late. Alternatives that are more efficient include hop-by-hop congestion control, which are better at avoiding conge stion before it occurs (Wang et al, 200