On the Interactions Between Layered Quality Adaptation and Congestion Control for Streaming Video
Nick Feamster, Deepak Bansal, Hari Balakrishnan · 2002
This paper uses analysis and experiments to study the impact of var-ious congestion control algorithms and receiver buffering strategies on the performance of streaming media delivery. While traditional congestion avoidance schemes such as TCP’s additive-increase/-multiplicativedecrease (AIMD) achieve high utilization, they also cause large oscillations in transmission rates that degrade the smooth-ness and perceptual quality of the video stream. We focus on un-derstanding the interactions of a family of congestion control al-gorithms that generalize AIMD, with buffer-based quality adapta-tion algorithms for hierarchically-encoded and simulcast video. Our work builds on and extends the results of Rejaie et al. [19]; we find that the combination of a non-AIMD algorithm that has smaller os-cillations than AIMD and a suitable receiver buffer allocation and management strategy provides a good combination of low playout delay and TCP-friendly congestion control. The paper describes these mechanisms and the results of experiments conducted using a prototype video server for MPEG-4 video, showing that our ap-proach can improve the interactivity and adaptivity of Internet video. 1