Fairness Measure - TCP Fairness

TCP Fairness

Congestion control mechanisms for new network transmission protocols or peer-to-peer applications must interact well with TCP. TCP fairness requires that a new protocol receive no larger share of the network than a comparable TCP flow. This is important as TCP is the dominant transport protocol on the Internet, and if new protocols acquire unfair capacity they tend to cause problems such as congestion collapse. This was the case with the first versions of RealMedia's streaming protocol: it was based on UDP and was widely blocked at organizational firewalls until a TCP-based version was developed.