Improving the start-up behaviour of TCP-friendly media transmissions
Jens Burkhard Schmitt, Michael Zink, Steffen Theiss, Ralf Steinmetz · 2002
The Internet has built its success story to a large degree on the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). Since TCP still represents the by far most important transport protocol in the current Internet traffic mix, new applications like media streaming need to take into account the social rules implied by TCP's congestion control algorithms, i.e., they need to behave TCP-friendly. One problem of this insight is that these new applications are not always well served by inheriting TCP's transmission scheme. In particular, TCP's initial start-up behaviour is a problem for streaming applications. In this paper, we try to address this problem by proposing a reflective server design which allows to do inter-session congestion control, i.e., to share network performance experiences between sessions to make informed congestion control decisions. Since our target application is media streaming, we show the design in the framework of a media server, which means in particular that we employ not TCP itself but a TCP-friendly transmissions scheme.