RAPID: A Reliable Protocol for Improving Delay

Recently, there has been a dramatic increase in interactive cloud based software applications (e.g. working on remote machines, online games, interactive websites such as financial, web search) and other soft real-time applications (traffic within data center). Compared to classical real-time media applications (VoIP/conferencing) and non real-time file delivery, these interactive software applications have unique characteristics as they are delay sensitive yet demand in order and reliable data delivery. Therefore existing protocols for delivery of lossless data (such as TCP) and other delivery protocols using UDP do not work well.

In this demo, we show substantially improved performance for such traffic by using a transport protocol built on top of UDP which uses intelligent adaptive forward error correction (FEC) and improved congestion control (rate control). The transport protocol is made lossless by using a hybrid FEC/ARQ strategy. The congestion control technique improves the delay performance by preventing congestion induced loss and minimizing queuing delay while still fully utilizing network capacity and maintaining fairness across flows. In this demo, we present RAPID (a bf Relibf Able transport bf Protocol for bf Improving end-to-end bf Delay) and show its effectiveness in improving the performance of interactive client-server applications.