skip to main content
research-article

Low-latency adaptive streaming over tcp

Published:18 September 2008Publication History
Skip Abstract Section

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.

References

  1. Allman, M. 2003. TCP congestion control with appropriate byte counting (ABC). Internet RFC 3465. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  2. Allman, M., Paxson, V., and Stevens, W. 1999. TCP congestion control. Internet RFC 2581. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  3. Bansal, D., Balakrishnan, H., Floyd, S., and Shenker, S. 2001. Dynamic behavior of slowly-responsive congestion control algorithms. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM. ACM, New York. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  4. Clark, D. D., and Tennenhouse, D. L. 1990. Architectural considerations for a new generation of protocols. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM. ACM, New York. 200--208. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  5. Feng, W., Kandlur, D. D., Saha, D., and Shin, K. S. 1997. Techniques for eliminating packet loss in congested TCP/IP networks. Tech. Rep. CSE-TR-349-97, Univ. Michigan. Nov.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  6. Feng, W., Liu, M., Krishnaswami, B., and Prabhudev, A. 1999. A priority-based technique for the best-effort delivery of stored video. In Proceedings of the SPIE Multimedia Computing and Networking Conference. 286--300.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  7. Floyd, S., Handley, M., and Kohler, E. 2002. Problem statement for DCP. Work in progress, IETF Internet Draft draft-floyd-dcp-problem-00.txt, expires Aug 2002.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  8. Floyd, S., Handley, M., Padhye, J., and Widmer, J. 2000. Equation-based congestion control for unicast applications. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM. ACM, New York. 43--56. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  9. Floyd, S. and Jacobson, V. 1993. Random early detection gateways for congestion avoidance. ACM/IEEE Trans. Netw. 1, 4 (Aug.), 397--413. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  10. Goel, A., Krasic, C., Li, K., and Walpole, J. 2002. Supporting low latency TCP-based media streams. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Quality of Service (IWQoS). 193--203.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  11. Huffaker, B., Fomenkov, M., Moore, D., and Claffy, K. C. 2001. Macroscopic analyses of the infrastructure: Measurement and visualization of internet connectivity and performance. In Proceedings of the workshop on Passive and Active Measurements (PAM2001).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  12. Hurley, P. and Le Boudec, J. Y. 1999. A proposal for an asymmetric best-effort service. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Quality of Service (IWQoS). 132--134.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  13. Iannaccone, G., May, M., and Diot, C. 2001. Aggregate traffic performance with active queue management and drop from tail. ACM Comput. Commun. Rev. 31, 3 (July), 4--13. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  14. ITU. 1993. Transmission Systems and Media, General Recommendation on the Transmission Quality for an Entire International Telephone Connection; One-Way Transmission Time. Geneva, Switzerland. Recommendation G.114, Telecommunication Standardization Sector of ITU.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  15. Kohler, E., Handley, M., and Floyd, S. 2006. Datagram congestion control protocol (DCCP). Internet RFC 4340.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  16. Kozuch, M. and Satyanarayanan, M. 2002. Internet Suspend/Resume. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications. 40--48. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  17. Krasic, C., Walpole, J., and Feng, W. 2003. Quality-adaptive media streaming by priority drop. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Network and Operating System Support for Digital Audio and Video (NOSSDAV). 112--121. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  18. Mathis, M., Mahdavi, J., Floyd, S., and Romanow, A. 1996. TCP selective acknowledgment options. Internet RFC 2018. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  19. Mathis, M., Semke, J., Mahdavi, J., and Lahey, K. 1999. Rate-halving algorithm for TCP congestion control. http://www.psc.edu/networking/ftp/papers/draft-ratehalving.txt.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  20. McCann, J., Deering, S., and Mogul, J. 1996. Path MTU discovery for IP version 6. Internet RFC 1981. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  21. NetMeeting. Windows Netmeeting. http://www.microsoft.com/netmeeting, viewed in Jun 2002.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  22. NISTnet. The NIST network emulation tool. http://www.antd.nist.gov/itg/nistnet, viewed in Jun 2002.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  23. Nonnenmacher, J., Biersack, E. W., and Towsley, D. 1998. Parity-based loss recovery for reliable multicast transmission. ACM/IEEE Trans. Netw. 6, 4, 349--361. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  24. Ramakrishnan, K., Floyd, S., and Black, D. 2001. The addition of explicit congestion notification (ECN) to IP. Internet RFC 3168. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  25. RealVNC Limited. 2002. Realvnc. http://www.realvnc.com.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  26. Rejaie, R., Handley, M., and Estrin, D. 1999. Quality adaptation for congestion controlled video playback over the internet. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM. ACM, New York. 189--200. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  27. Rizzo, L. 1997. Effective erasure codes for reliable computer communication protocols. ACM Comput. Commun. Rev. 27, 2 (Apr.), 24--36. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  28. Salim, J. H. and Almed, U. 2000. Performance evaluation of explicit congestion notification (ECN) in IP networks. Internet RFC 2884. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  29. Semke, J., Mahdavi, J., and Mathis, M. 1998. Automatic TCP buffer tuning. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM. ACM, New York. 315--323. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  30. Shenker, S., Zhang, L., and Clark, D. 1991. Observations on the dynamics of a congestion control algorithm: The effects of two-way traffic. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM. ACM, New York. 133--147. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  31. Skype. Skype. http://www.skype.com/.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  32. Stewart, R., Xie, Q., Morneault, K., Sharp, C., Schwarzbauer, H., Taylor, T., Rytina, I., Kalla, M., Zhang, L., and Paxson, V. 2000. Stream control transmission protocol. Internet RFC 2960. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  33. Yang, Y. R., and Lam, S. S. 2000. General aimd congestion control. Tech. Rep. TR-2000-09, University of Texas at Austin. Austin, TX, May. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library

Index Terms

  1. Low-latency adaptive streaming over tcp

      Recommendations

      Comments

      Login options

      Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

      Sign in

      Full Access

      • Published in

        cover image ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications
        ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications  Volume 4, Issue 3
        August 2008
        136 pages
        ISSN:1551-6857
        EISSN:1551-6865
        DOI:10.1145/1386109
        Issue’s Table of Contents

        Copyright © 2008 ACM

        Publisher

        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        • Published: 18 September 2008
        • Accepted: 1 October 2007
        • Revised: 1 November 2005
        • Received: 1 June 2005
        Published in tomm Volume 4, Issue 3

        Permissions

        Request permissions about this article.

        Request Permissions

        Check for updates

        Qualifiers

        • research-article
        • Research
        • Refereed

      PDF Format

      View or Download as a PDF file.

      PDF

      eReader

      View online with eReader.

      eReader
      About Cookies On This Site

      We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website.

      Learn more

      Got it!