Performance of Early Retransmission Scheme and Delay Based Protocol in Video Streaming

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an early retransmission scheme to improve TCP's performance in delivering time-sensitive media. Our extensive ns2 simulations show significant improvement. When integrated into a traditional TCP variant, namely TCP-SACK, the early retransmission scheme can substantially reduce the latency caused by retransmission timeout. As a result, it can help TCP-SACK achieve a considerably higher success rate in delivering real time media. Early Retransmission also enhances the performance of a delay-based TCP variant, namely PERT. Furthermore, we also explore the improvement brought by employing a fine-grained retransmission timer, and compare it with ER. We find out that ER outperforms the fine grained timer in a variety of conditions and the combination of the two can further improve performance.