Streaming Stored Continuous Media
over Fair-Share Bandwidth
Despina Saparilla
University of Pennsylvania
Keith W. Ross
Institut EURECOM
Abstract:
We investigate the impact of the long-term behavior of
fair-share bandwidth on transmission schemes for streaming stored
Continuous Media (CM). To obtain typical fair-share bandwidth conditions,
we perform a series of Internet experiments in which we
monitor TCP bulk-data transfers between various sites, and collect
average TCP throughput traces. The collected traces exhibit high-variability
over a broad range of time scales as well as self-similar
scaling behavior over longer time scales. Under fair-share bandwidth
conditions, we evaluate the performance of a series of data transmission
schemes for non-layered CM, and of several bandwidth allocation
schemes for streaming layered CM. Our findings demonstrate
that prefetching during playback over intervals of several minutes is
necessary for achieving best quality. For layered CM encoded into
two layers, we propose a threshold-based inter-layer bandwidth allocation
scheme, and a measurement-based heuristic for dynamically
computing the threshold. Our empirical results show that, using
conservative estimates for future average bandwidth, our heuristic
is highly reliable.