BEST: Buffer-driven Efficient STreaming protocol

Abstract

The standard streaming protocol is mostly based on UDP with no end-to-end congestion control. For this reason, wide usage of multimedia applications in Internet might lead to congested networks. To avoid such a situation, the congestion controlled streaming protocols have been developed. However, by considering only the stability aspect of network, some works ignore the characteristics of multimedia streaming applications. Moreover, most of previous works have no consideration on the characteristics of wide spreading high-speed networks. In this paper, in order to overcome limitations of the previous streaming protocols, we propose a new streaming protocol called "BEST(Buffer-driven Efficient STreaming)". The BEST protocol takes a hybrid viewpoint that considers both user viewpoint and network viewpoint. Therefore, the BEST protocol improves the network stability by reducing the packet loss and it also provides the smoothed playback by preventing buffer underflow or overflow. The BEST protocol is designed to consider high-speed networks with longer delay. Through the simulation, it is proved that the BEST protocol has a better performance than previous works in high-speed network environments. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.