Multimedia streaming via TCP: an analytic performance study

Abstract

TCP is widely used in commercial media streaming systems, with recent measurement studies indicating that a significant fraction of Internet streaming media is currently delivered over HTTP/TCP. These observations motivate us to develop analytic performance models to systematically investigate the performance of TCP for both live and stored media streaming. We validate our models via ns simulations and experiments conducted over the Internet. Our models provide guidelines indicating the circumstances under which TCP streaming leads to satisfactory performance, showing, for example, that TCP generally provides good streaming performance when the achievable TCP throughput is roughly twice the media bitrate, with only a few seconds of startup delay.