TCP Nice is a system intended to provide an abstraction of infinite free network bandwidth for background data. The primary goals are  (i) to eliminate interference with regular demand traffic, and (ii) to reap a significant fraction of the spare network bandwidth available. Our studies and analyses show that Nice can approximate prioritization at the routers without modifying the routers at all, by just modifying the sender side. Nice thus allows us to inject invisible traffic into the network that makes good use of the spare bandwidth without affecting the traffic already present. The main paper describing TCP-Nice is here:

• TCP Nice: A Mechanism for Background Transfers Arun Venkataramani, Ravi Kokku and Mike Dahlin. In the 5th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 2002), Dec 2002, Boston, USA.