TCP-ROME: A Transport-Layer Approach to Enhance Quality of Experience for Online Media Streaming

Live streaming of multimedia content over the Internet is rapidly increasing, e.g. with the Web 2.0 and via peer-to-peer systems. While many homes today are equipped with sufficient bandwidth (DSL) to support high quality live streaming, the quality of experience of a user is dismal: the video resolution and size is small and the displaying is often interrupted. One of the key problems arises because TCP is used as the underlying transport layer protocol: packet loss, retransmissions and timeouts prevent TCP from delivering a timely, steady flow of packets and thus inhibits the provision of online multimedia content. This paper presents TCP-ROME, a novel transport-layer framework that allows an establishment of multiple TCP connections between one client with possibly multiple home addresses and multiple co-located or distributed servers. The download over multiple TCP connections increases the total throughput by aggregating the resources of multiple TCP connections. Moreover, TCP-ROME provides the means to overcome bandwidth fluctuations and network bottlenecks by dynamically coordinating the downloaded content from the different servers and by coordinating and adapting the streaming rate of the different connections to meet the bandwidth requirements of the video.