RFC 3448 specifies TCP-Friendly Rate Control (TFRC). Instead of specifying a complete protocol, this document simply specifies a congestion control mechanism that could be used in a transport protocol such as RTP, in an application incorporating end-to-end congestion control at the application level, or in the context of endpoint congestion management.

TFRC is a congestion control mechanism for unicast flows operating in a best-effort Internet environment. TFRC is designed to be reasonably fair when competing for bandwidth with TCP flows, where a flow is "reasonably fair" if its sending rate is generally within a factor of two of the sending rate of a TCP flow under the same conditions. However, TFRC has a much lower variation of throughput over time compared with TCP, which makes it more suitable for applications such as telephony or streaming media where a relatively smooth sending rate is of importance.

The penalty of having smoother throughput than TCP while competing fairly for bandwidth is that TFRC responds slower than TCP to changes in available bandwidth. Thus TFRC should only be used when the application has a requirement for smooth throughput, in particular, avoiding TCP’s halving of the sending rate in response to a single packet drop. For applications that simply need to transfer as much data as possible in as short a time as possible we recommend using TCP, or if reliability is not required, using an Additive-Increase, Multiplicative-Decrease (AIMD) congestion control scheme with similar parameters to those used by TCP.

For its congestion control mechanism, TFRC directly uses a throughput equation for the allowed sending rate as a function of the loss event rate and round-trip time. In order to compete fairly with TCP, TFRC uses the TCP throughput equation, which roughly describes TCP’s sending rate as a function of the loss event rate, round-trip time, and packet size. We define a loss event as one or more lost or marked packets from a window of data, where a marked packet refers to a congestion indication from Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN).

The data sender sends a stream of data packets to the data receiver at a controlled rate. When a feedback packet is received from the data receiver, the data sender changes its sending rate, based on the information contained in the feedback report. If the sender does not receive a feedback report for two round trip times, it cuts its sending rate in half. This is achieved by means of a timer called the nofeedback timer.

Obtaining an accurate and stable measurement of the loss event rate is of primary importance for TFRC. Loss rate measurement is performed at the receiver, based on the detection of lost or marked packets from the sequence numbers of arriving packets. We describe this process before describing the rest of the receiver protocol.

The receiver periodically sends feedback messages to the sender. Feedback packets should normally be sent at least once per RTT, unless the sender is sending at a rate of less than one packet per RTT, in which case a feedback packet should be send for every data packet received. A feedback packet should also be sent whenever a new loss event is detected without waiting for the end of an RTT, and whenever an out-of-order data packet is received that removes a loss event from the history.