Does TCP new congestion window validation improve HTTP adaptive streaming performance?

Abstract

When using HTTP adaptive streaming, video traffic exhibits on-off behaviour with frequent idle periods that can interact poorly with TCP congestion control algorithms. New congestion window validation (New CWV) modifies TCP to allow senders to recover their sending rate more quickly after certain idle periods. While previous work has shown that New CWV can improve transport performance for streaming video, it has not been shown if this translates to improved application performance in terms of playback stability. In this paper, we show that New CWV can reduce video re-buffering events by up to 4%, and limit representation switches by 12%, without any changes to existing rate adaptation algorithms.