A Reflective Server Design to Speedup TCP-friendly Media Transmissions at Start-Up
Key: SZTS03-1
Author: Jens Schmitt, Michael Zink, Steffen Theiss, Ralf Steinmetz
Date: February 2003
Kind: In proceedings
Publisher: Springer Informatik Aktuell
Book title: Tagungsband Kommunikation in Verteilten Systemen 2003 (KiVS'03), Leipzig, Germany
Abstract: The Internet has built its success story to a large degree on the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). Since TCP still represents the by far most important transport protocol in the current Internet traffic mix, new applications like media streaming need to take into account the social rules implied by TCP's congestion control algorithms, i.e., they need to behave TCP-friendly. One problem of this insight is that these new applications are not always well served by inheriting TCP's transmission scheme. In particular, TCP's initial start-up behaviour is a problem for streaming applications. In this paper, we try to address this problem by proposing a reflective server design which allows to do inter-session congestion control, i.e., to share network performance experiences between sessions to make informed congestion control decisions. Since our focus is media streaming, we show the design in the framework of a media server, which means in particular not employing TCP itself but a TCP-friendly transmissions scheme.
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