Throughput
In Chapter 1 we introduced the concept of available throughput, which, in the context of a communication session between two processes along a network path, is the rate at which the sending process can deliver bits to the receiving process. Because other sessions will be sharing the bandwidth along the network path, and because these other sessions will be coming and going, the available throughput can fluctuate with time. These observations lead to another natural service that a transport-layer protocol could provide, namely, guaranteed available throughput at some specified rate. With such a service, the application could request a guaranteed throughput of r bits/sec, and the transport protocol would then ensure that the available throughput is always at least r bits/sec. Such a guaranteed throughput service would appeal to many applications. For example, if an Internet telephony application encodes voice at 32 kbps, it needs to send data into the network and have data delivered to the receiving application at this rate. If the transport protocol cannot provide this throughput, the application would need to encode at a lower rate (and receive enough throughput to sustain this lower coding rate) or may have to give up, since receiving, say, half of the needed throughput is of little or no use to this Internet telephony application. Applications that have throughput requirements are said to be bandwidth-sensitive applications. Many current multimedia applications are bandwidth sensitive, although some multimedia applications may use adaptive coding techniques to encode digitized voice or video at a rate that matches the currently available throughput. While bandwidth-sensitive applications have specific throughput requirements, elastic applications can make use of as much, or as little, throughput as happens to be available. Electronic mail, file transfer, and Web transfers are all elastic applications. Of course, the more throughput, the better. There’s an adage that says that one cannot be too rich, too thin, or have too much throughput!