Empirical evaluation of the congestion responsiveness of RealPlayer video streams

Increasingly popular commercial streaming media applications over the Internet often use UDP as the underlying transmission protocol for performance reasons. Hand-in-hand with the increase in streaming media comes the impending threat of unresponsive UDP traffic, often cited as the major threat to the stability of the Internet. Unfortunately, there are few empirical studies that analyze the responsiveness, or lack of it, of commercial streaming media applications. In this work, we evaluate the responsiveness of RealNetworks' RealVideo over UDP by measuring the performance of numerous streaming video clips selected from a variety of RealServers on the Internet, analyze the TCPFriendliness of the UDP streams and correlate the results with network and application layer statistics. We find that most RealVideo UDP streams respond to Internet congestion by reducing the application layer encoding rate, and streams with a minimum encoding rate less than the fair share of the capacity ofte...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: MTA
• Authors: Jae Chung, Mark Claypool
• Keywords: Commercial Streaming Media, Media Applications, MTA 2006, Streaming Media