9. Conclusion
In this paper, we advocated a networking paradigm where the objective is not to control congestion but rather to utilize it. In contrast to the present TCP-based Internet, we proposed an architecture built upon a completely different principle by omitting congestion control and applying fair schedulers in network routers. We have designed, developed and implemented a novel transport protocol called Digital Fountain based Communication Protocol (DFCP), which relies on a fountain code based data transfer mechanism. We validated the performance of DFCP on various network topologies and on multiple platforms including our laboratory testbed, the Emulab network emulation environment and the ns-2 network simulator. Moreover, we carried out a comparative performance evaluation of DFCP with the most relevant TCP variants. We found that unlike TCP versions, DFCP is insensitive to packet loss and delay in a wide range of realistic working regimes highlighting its benefits for many areas like wireless communication. In addition, we concluded from the results that DFCP is able to work with small buffers, hence it can support bufferless all-optical networking. From the Quality of Experience (QoE) point of view, we investigated the flow transfer efficiency for both short-lived and long-lived flows, and pointed out that the user experience can be significantly improved by using DFCP. We also showed that digital fountain based transport guarantees good scalability both in terms of performance and fairness for increasing number of flows and link capacity. Finally, we discussed the possible applications of our proposal and outlined some open issues.
