Supporting low latency TCP-based media streams

The dominance of the TCP protocol on the Internet and its success in maintaining Internet stability has led to several TCP-based stored media-streaming approaches. The success of these approaches raises the question whether TCP can be used for low-latency streaming. Low latency streaming allows responsive control operations for media streaming and can make interactive applications feasible. We examined adapting the TCP send buffer size based on TCP´s congestion window to reduce application perceived network latency. Our results show that this simple idea significantly improves the number of packets that can be delivered within 200 ms and 500 ms thresholds.