Performance evaluation of end-to-end TCP-friendly video transfer in the Internet

Abstract

We use network simulator ns2 to evaluate the performance of a TCP-friendly rate-based control protocol for transferring high-quality video in the Internet. Apart from studying the friendliness property of the TCP-friendly protocol, we define and use the rate-uniformness metric to study the degree of mismatch in the video transfer rate. The latter metric suggests the delivered quality of the MPEG2 video traffic at the receiver side. Using these metrics, we evaluate the performance using the best and the worst RED configurations determined in our previous work. We use TFRCP, an equation-based TCP-friendly protocol for transporting the MPEG2 video traffic against the competing TCP Sack sources. Our results shows that under the best RED configuration, the TCP-friendly protocol is capable of preserving the friendliness behavior while delivering high-quality video.