How BBR Improves the Quality of Live TV Streaming Experience
Jiyan Salim Mahmud, Tamás Jursonovics, Imre Lendák · 2025
Content delivery networks(CDN) faced vast increases in user demand in the early 2020s both in live video streaming and in video on demand services. This was mainly due to the popularity of over the top(OTT) Streaming. Internet service providers (ISPs) tend to simplify their broadcast delivery pipelines and abandon legacy multicast protocols in favor of unicast streaming which requires a scalable, reliable CDN infrastructure. One possible approach towards improving user experience is to adopt user-optimal implementation or smarter TCP congestion control algorithms to address problems such as disruption of services, buffer underruns and degradation of quality of service. In this study we compared two TCP congestion control algorithms (BBRv1 and CUBIC) in a real-life commercial IPTV environment for video streaming with the ultimate goal to improve customer quality of experience. Such analyses can be useful to any ISPs to optimize their infrastructure, achieve near-optimal to optimal bandwidth utilization, thereby smoothen service delivery and attract more customers. The findings demonstrate that BBRv1 significantly enhances TCP KPIs' performances, throughput, round-trip time (RTT), and congestion window (cwnd) by 36%, 32%, and 78%, respectively. These improvements collectively lead to enhancements in Quality of experience (QoE) for the end user such as join time and latency and an anticipated reduction in profile switches within the streaming process. These factors play a pivotal role in enhancing the overall quality of experience offered to customers.