Media Streaming via TFRC: An Analytical Study of the Impact of TFRC on User-Perceived Media Quality

— TCP-Friendly Rate Control (TFRC) is being adopted in Internet standards for congestion control of various streaming media applications. In this paper, we consider the transmission of pre-recorded media from a server to a client by using TFRC, and analytically study the impact of TFRC on user-perceived media quality, which is roughly measured by calculating the rebuffering probability. A rebuffering probability is defined to be the probability that the total duration of all rebuffering events experienced by a user is longer than a certain threshold. Two approaches are presented to help an application determine an appropriate initial buffering delay and media playback rate in order to achieve a certain rebuffering probability under a given network condition. First, we derive a closedform expression to approximate the average TFRC sending rate, which could be used as the maximum allowed playback rate of a media stream. Second, we develop a queueing model for a TFRC client buffer with...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Lisong Xu, Josh Helzer
• Keywords: Communications, INFOCOM 2006, Playback Rate, Rebuffering Probability, TCP-Friendly Rate Control