A simple and effective mechanism for stored video streaming with TCP transport and server-side adaptive frame discard

TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) with its well-established congestion control mechanism is the prevailing transport layer protocol for non-real time data in current IP (Internet Protocol) networks. It would be desirable to transmit any type of multimedia data using TCP in order to take advantage of the extensive operational experience behind TCP in the Internet. However, some features of TCP including retransmissions and variations in throughput and delay, although not catastrophic for non-real time data, may result in inefficiencies for video streaming applications. In this paper, we propose an architecture which consists of an input buffer at the server side, coupled with the congestion control mechanism of TCP at the transport layer, for efficiently streaming stored video in the best-effort Internet. The proposed buffer management scheme selectively discards low priority frames from its head-end, which otherwise would jeopardize the successful playout of high priority frames. Moreover, the proposed discarding policy is adaptive to changes in the bandwidth available to the video stream.