MSB: Media Streaming Booster

Report ID: TR-666-02
Author: Nakao, Akihiro / Peterson, Larry / Wang, Limin
Date: 2002-12-00
Pages: 12
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Abstract:

The recent trend of constructing application-level overlays makes it increasingly common to have end-to-end paths decomposed into multiple overlay segments (tunnels). This paper investigates the potential benefits of making these intermediate overlay nodes both application- and congestion-aware in the context of streaming media. In particular, we demonstrate that hop-by-hop congestion control improves the quality of TCP-friendly delivery of layered video applications by up to a factor of four in the steady state. Moreover, the resulting system is significantly more responsive to changes in capacity, all the while not negatively impacting competing TCP flows.