Evaluation of Probabilistic Early Response TCP (PERT) for Video Delivery and Extension with ACK Coalescing

Abstract

This thesis demonstrates the performance of Probabilistic Early Response TCP (PERT), a new TCP congestion control, for video streaming. As a delay based protocol, it measures the delay at the end host and adjusts the congestion window accordingly. Our experiments show that PERT improves video delivery performance by decreasing the fraction of packets delivered late. Furthermore, our Linux live streaming test indicates that PERT is able to reduce the playback glitches, when high resolution video is delivered over a link with non-zero packet loss. In order to operate PERT at higher thoughputs, we design PERT to work with Acknowledgement (ACK) coalescing at the receiver. ACK coalescing makes data transfers burstier and makes it hard to estimate delays accurately. We apply TCP pacing to fix this issue, and validate its effectiveness in the aspects of throughput, packet loss and fairness. Our experiment results also show that PERT with Delayed ACK and Pacing is more friendly, and therefore more suitable when multiple traffic flows are competing for limited bottleneck bandwidth or sharing the same router buffer.