Context-adaptive cross-layer TCP optimization for Internet video streaming

The tremendous growth of video content over the Internet and evolution towards more personalized video applications has led to a need for a network and service infrastructure better suited to today´s content and mobility needs. Quality of Experience (QoE) management is one of the major challenges for video delivery given the limited bandwidth for wireless access network causing video packet drops and the core network congestion impacting video service delay. In this context, the current TCP-based model used for HTTP streaming presents challenges due to throughput variation and high latency. We present a context-adaptive cross-layer optimization approach to enhance video streaming over TCP that introduces network and content awareness in TCP operation to provide adaptive reliability and smoother throughput. Our proposed solution requires implementation changes only on the receiver side without impacting the TCP sender implementation. We validated the proposed solution through OPNET simulations and the results show some significant performance gains in both TCP throughput and video QoE metrics.