The Case for Streaming Multimedia with TCP

In this paper, we revisit and challenge the dogma that TCP is an undesirable choice for streaming multimedia, video in particular. For some time, the common view held that neither TCP nor UDP, the Internet’s main transport protocols, are adequate for video applications. UDP’s service model doesn’t provide enough support to the application while TCP’s provides too much. Consequently, numerous research works proposed new transport protocols with alternate service-models as more suitable for video. For example, such service models might provide higher reliability than UDP but not the full-reliability of TCP. More recently, study of Internet dynamics has shown that TCP’s stature as the predominant protocol persists. Through some combination of accident and design, TCP’s congestion avoidance mechanism seems essential to the Internet’s scalability and stability. Research on modeling TCP dynamics in order to effectively define the notion of TCP-friendly congestion avoidance is...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: IDMS
• Authors: Charles Krasic, Kang Li, Jonathan Walpole
• Keywords: Congestion Avoidance, IDMS 2001, Multimedia, TCP’s Congestion Avoidance, Transport Protocols