Rate-Distortion Optimized Video Streaming with Rich Acknowledgments

We consider an unconventional procedure for communicating to the server the receipt of media packets for Internet video streaming. Instead of separately acknowledging each media packet as it arrives, we periodically send to the server a single acknowledgment packet, denoted rich acknowledgment, that contains information about all media packets that have arrived at the client by the time the rich acknowledgment is sent. We investigate rate-distortion optimized sender-driven streaming that employs rich acknowledgments. Performance gains of up to 1.3 dB for streaming packetized video content are observed over rate-distortion optimized senderdriven systems that employ conventional acknowledgments.