DRTP: a generic Differentiated Reliable Transport Protocol

With rapid development of network communications, the performance requirements of applications are getting more differentiated. Many applications like high-definition video transfer require high throughput but do tolerate occasional packet losses. Traditional generic transport protocols however, only provide inflexible data transfer guarantees (TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) offers full reliability guarantees and UDP (User Datagram Protocol) offers no guarantees). Moreover, TCP pays a significant price to ensure a full reliability guarantee over lossy wireless communications environment like 5G millimeter wave (mmWave) communications. While existing, “partially” reliable transport protocols are either specifically designed for certain applications or need router's support. In this paper, we design a new generic Differentiated Reliable Transport Protocol (DRTP), aiming to provide a differentiated and deterministic reliability guarantee for upper layer applications while maximizing the throughput under the constraint of guaranteeing a required reliability of data transfer. DRTP is a generic and pure end-to-end partially reliable transport protocol, and as such is easy to deploy regardless of the application in use and with no need for router's support. The performance of DRTP is evaluated under various network conditions using extensive NS-3 (Network Simulator) simulations and practical experiments over the mmWave communications environment. The results show much higher throughput compared to typical transport protocols while guaranteeing the required transfer reliability.