Packet Spacing: An Enabling Mechanism for Delivering Multimedia Content in Computational Grids

Streaming multimedia with UDP has become increasingly popular over distributed systems like the Internet. Scientific applications that stream multimedia include remote computational steering of visualization data and videoon-demand teleconferencing over the Access Grid. However, UDP does not possess a self-regulating, congestioncontrol mechanism; and most best-effort traffic is served by congestion-controlled TCP. Consequently, UDP steals bandwidth from TCP such that TCP flows starve for network resources. With the volume of Internet traffic continuing to increase, the perpetuation of UDP-based streaming will cause the Internet to collapse as it did in the mid-1980's due to the use of non-congestion-controlled TCP. To address this problem, we introduce the counterintuitive notion of inter-packet spacing with control feedback to enable UDP-based applications to perform well in the next-generation Internet and computational grids. When compared with traditional UDP-based streaming,...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: TJS
• Authors: Annette C. Feng, Apu Kapadia, Wu-chun Feng, Geneva G. Belford
• Keywords: Computational Steering, Congestion-controlled Tcp, Internet, TJS 2002