An analytical model for streaming over TCP

  • Authors:

  • Jinyao Yan;Wolfgang Mühlbauer;Bernhard Plattner

  • Affiliations:

  • Computer Engineering and Networks Laboratory, ETH Zurich, Switzerland and Communication University of China, Beijing, China;Computer Engineering and Networks Laboratory, ETH Zurich, Switzerland;Computer Engineering and Networks Laboratory, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • NEW2AN'11/ruSMART'11 Proceedings of the 11th international conference and 4th international conference on Smart spaces and next generation wired/wireless networking
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Streaming over TCP has become popular as demonstrated by the example of YouTube. To cope with variability in data throughput, streaming applications typically implement buffers. Yet, for improving the quality of user experience, it is critical to dimension buffers and initial buffering delays appropriately. In this paper, we develop an analytical framework that describes the dimensioning of appropriate buffers. To this end, we propose to rely on modeling congestion window sizes immediately before a triple duplicate or timeout event. We observe that such "bounds" on TCP window sizes follow a Gamma distribution. Although being of general use due to its simplicity and accuracy, our proposed TCP model is particularly useful for TCP streaming. As confirmed by experiments, it allows to estimate the frequency of buffer overflow or underflow events if buffer sizes and initial buffering delays are known parameters in the proposed TCP streaming model, or conversely, to dimension the buffer appropriately