End-to-end Internet video traffic dynamics: statistical study and analysis

We analyze the dynamics of a seven-month real-time streaming experiment, which was conducted between a number of unicast dialup clients, connecting to the Internet through access points in more than 600 major US cities, and a backbone video server. During the experiment, the clients streamed low-bitrate MPEG-4 video sequences from the server over paths with more than 5,000 distinct Internet routers. We describe the methodology of the experiment and the architecture of our NACK-based streaming application, study end-to-end dynamics of 16 thousand ten-minute sessions (85 million packets), and analyze the behavior of the following network parameters: packet loss, round-trip delay, and packet reordering. We also study the impact of these parameters on the quality of real-time streaming (i.e., the number of underflow events).