MSB: Media Streaming Booster

Abstract:

The recent trend of constructing application-level overlays makes it
increasingly common to have end-to-end paths decomposed into multiple
overlay segments (tunnels). This paper investigates the potential
benefits of making these intermediate overlay nodes both application-
and congestion-aware in the context of streaming media. In particular,
we demonstrate that hop-by-hop congestion control improves the quality
of TCP-friendly delivery of layered video applications by up to a
factor of four in the steady state. Moreover, the resulting system is
significantly more responsive to changes in capacity, all the while
not negatively impacting competing TCP flows.