Low-latency adaptive streaming over tcp

ABSTRACT

Media streaming over TCP has become increasingly popular because TCP's congestion control provides remarkable stability to the Internet. Streaming over TCP requires adapting to bandwidth availability, but unforunately, TCP can introduce significant latency at the application level, which causes unresponsive and poor adaptation. This article shows that this latency is not inherent in TCP but occurs as a result of throughput-optimized TCP implementations. We show that this latency can be minimized by dynamically tuning TCP's send buffer. Our evaluation shows that this approach leads to better application-level adaptation and it allows supporting interactive and other low-latency applications over TCP.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.5 Local and Wide-Area Networks
          Subjects: Internet (e.g., TCP/IP)

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.4 Communications Management
          Subjects: Network communication; Buffering

General Terms:
Measurement, Performance

Keywords:
TCP, low latency streaming, multimedia applications