Enhancing TCP to Improve Throughput of HTTP Adaptive Streaming
Xinying Liu, Aidong Men, Peng Zhang · International Journal of Future Generation Communication and Networking · 2014
With increasing video service consumption through IP network, HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) technology has become popular. The chunked transmission and application-layer adaption create a different traffic pattern than traditional progressive download where the entire video is downloaded with a single request. Its start and stop activity cause burst and retransmission timeout (RTO) which result in more packet loss and longer packet transfer delay. Both of them can substantially degrade the achievable throughput of HAS streams. However, few works studied the impact of HAS activity pattern on TCP performance. In this paper, the reason caused the poor performance of HAS is pointed out, and the two serverbased algorithms are proposed to improve the achievable throughput of HAS streams. The two algorithms are implemented at the beginning and end of a chunk transmission separately. They aim to improve the performance of HAS through smoothing the burst and avoiding RTO. The simulation results show that these proposed algorithms increase the achievable throughput of HAS streams greatly and keep HAS streams friendly with other TCP flows at the same time.