Improving TCP/IP performance over last-hop wireless networks for streaming video delivery

This paper discusses a protocol for delivery of streaming video with a short play-out deadline over a last-hop wireless network, which trades reliability for latency. This protocol could be implemented in the wireless access point to improve the quality of the received streaming video over an Internet connection to an office or home. The main ideas of the protocols are two-fold: 1) across the wireless link: perform local retransmissions and drop any stale packets; 2) across the entire source-destination path: hide duplicated acknowledgements from the sender to avoid retransmissions. In addition, the protocol takes advantage of application level framing and acknowledges missing transport layer segments with expired play-out deadlines. Although several existing protocols partially solve the problem of streaming video delivery in this particular context, either by improving the performance of the wireless link or by dropping the stale packets, to our best knowledge none of the protocols solves the complete problem. The performance of our protocol is compared against the performance of the snoop, TCP RTM, combined with snoop and TCP RTM protocols, as well as TCP Reno. The results of simulations show a manyfold improvement of the goodput across a wide range of packet-error rates