Applying Active Window Management for Jitter Control and Loss Avoidance in Video Streaming over TCP Connections

Improving video streaming performance is a main target today for the development of services and related business opportunities in the Internet. For this reason the definition of an efficient video transport paradigm is yet a challenging task. The most common protocol for data transmission in the Internet is TCP but it has been widely believed not suitable for multimedia streaming because of bandwidth instability and retransmissions. However, the dominance of TCP makes desirable the possibility to use it without any modifications. The main idea of this paper is to improve the performance of video streaming by using TCP, by combining it with Active Window Management (AWM), an algorithm to be implemented by video content Providers in their Internet access router. Through an extensive analysis the paper demonstrates that thanks to AWM, packet losses are avoided while per-packet delivery delay is maintained almost constant, strongly decreasing transmission jitter; consequently the required video playout buffer can be substantially reduced with respect to the classical approaches.