A Measurement Study of TCP Performance for Chunk Delivery in DASH

Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) has emerged as an increasingly popular paradigm for video streaming [13], in which a video is segmented into many chunks delivered to users by HTTP request/response over Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connections. Therefore, it is intriguing to study the performance of strategies implemented in conventional TCPs, which are not dedicated for video streaming, e.g., whether chunks are efficiently delivered when users perform interactions with the video players. In this paper, we conduct measurement studies on users chunk requesting traces in DASH from a representative video streaming provider, to investigate users behaviors in DASH, and TCP-connection-level traces from CDN servers, to investigate the performance of TCP for DASH. By studying how video chunks are delivered in both the slow start and congestion avoidance phases, our observations have revealed the performance characteristics of TCP for DASH as follows: (1) Request patterns in DASH have a great impact on the performance of TCP variations including cubic; (2) Strategies in conventional TCPs may cause user perceived quality degradation in DASH streaming; (3) Potential improvement to TCP strategies for better delivery in DASH can be further explored.