A Hysteresis Based Approach for Quality, Frame Rate, and Buffer Management for Video Streaming Using TCP

In today’s Internet, the primary transport mechanism for video streams is the UDP protocol, either congestion sensitive or not. In this paper, we propose a mechanism that supports the high quality streaming and adaptation of stored video across best-effort networks using the TCP transport protocol. Our proposed approach has a number of useful features. First, it is built on top of TCP, which effectively separates the adaptation and streaming from the transport protocol. This makes the question of TCP-friendliness, the behavioral property of a flow that allows fair-sharing of bandwidth with other flows, much easier to answer. Second, it does not rely on any special handling or support from the network itself, although any additional support from the network itself will indirectly help increase the video quality. Finally, we show through experimentation that this approach provides a viable alternative for streaming media across best-effort networks.