Multimedia streaming using multiple TCP connections

Abstract

In recent years, multimedia applications over the Internet become increasingly popular. However, packet loss, delay, and time-varying bandwidth of the Internet have remained the major problems for multimedia streaming applications. As such, a number of approaches, including network infrastructure and protocol, source and channel coding, have been proposed to either overcome or alleviate these drawbacks of the Internet. In this article, we propose the MultiTCP system, a receiver-driven, TCP-based system for multimedia streaming over the Internet. Our proposed algorithm aims at providing resilience against short term insufficient bandwidth by using multiple TCP connections for the same application. Our proposed system enables the application to achieve and control the desired sending rate during congested periods, which cannot be achieved using traditional TCP. Finally, our proposed system is implemented at the application layer, and hence, no kernel modification to TCP is necessary. We analyze the proposed system, and present simulation and experimental results to demonstrate its advantages over the traditional single-TCP-based approach.