On the TCP-Friendliness of VoIP Traffic
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Overview: Some concerns have been raised about whether the increase of UDP traffic due to Skype type of applications will throttle down regular TCP users. This concern comes from the fact that UDP connections are unresponsive to congestion, i.e., UDP senders do not reduce their sending rates when congestion occurs. On the other hand, most UDP based real time applications, such as Voice-over-IP (VoIP) applications, will drop out completely if the user perceived quality becomes unacceptable as the network congestion increases. This user back-off mechanism effectively reduces UDP traffic rate when the network is congested.

