The Internet is undergoing changes of its traffic mix, with the IP-based interactive multimedia applications gaining momentum. According to studies, UDP-based multimedia traffic has in recent years risen to above 25% of the overall Internet traffic volume, as compared to only 5% a decade ago. To these delay sensitive real-time interactive multimedia applications, out of delay boundary packets are usually obsolete. However the current Internet Protocol lacks a way to control the lifetime of the packets effectively. In this paper, we propose the Explicit Delay Control (EDC) as a viable packet lifetime control mechanism designed for such purpose. It uses an embedded Maximum Tolerable Delay (MTD) field in an IPv4 option. The value of MTD is determined by taking the application specific delay bound, measured round-trip-time, and the estimations of the path propagation delay and transmission delay into account. At each network node, the MTD is deducted by the singlehop delay. Packets that ex...
Xiaoyuan Gu, Dirk Markwardt, Lars C. Wolf