Streaming Traffic Fairness Over Low Bandwidth WAN Links

Despite the rising popularity of streaming media in corporations, there is little understanding of how streaming traffic interacts with other corporate network traffic over low-bandwidth WAN links. We used simulations to study the issue, and found that the buffer-based rate adaptation algorithms used in popular streaming applications is effective at making the streaming traffic behave in a fair manner, even when UDP is used as the transport. The congestion control is affected by the buffer size: small buffers make the streaming application timid and large buffers make it more aggressive. However, regardless of the buffer size, the streaming traffic can be adversely affected by multi-session TCP traffic such as web traffic, and other QoS mechanisms are needed to preserve streaming quality in this case.