ESTIMATING PACKET ARRIVAL TIMES IN BURSTY VIDEO APPLICATIONS (WedPmOR1)

Author(s) : Ali C. Begen (Georgia Institute of Technology, United States of America) Yucel Altunbasak (Georgia Institute of Technology, United States of America)

Abstract : In retransmission-based error-control methods, the most fundamental yet the paramount problem is to determine how long the sender (or the receiver) should wait before deciding that an unacknowledged (or a missing) packet is lost. This waiting time is generally referred to as retransmission timeout (RTO). An accurate RTO estimation has two main advantages: First, the lost packets can be identified earlier, and hence, can be recovered faster. Second, number of redundant retransmissions can be decreased, which subsequently not only saves the network resources but also helps the existing network congestion alleviate sooner. Unfortunately, the existing algorithms available today tend to avoid any unnecessary retransmission at the expense of long waiting times. While this policy can be justified for data applications, it is not well-suited for delay-sensitive applications, for which the agility in recovering the lost packets is as important. Motivated by this observation, we recently introduced a technique for streaming applications that could be used to identify the lost packets quickly while keeping the average excessive waiting times at negligible levels [1]. Provided that the packets are transmitted at equal intervals at the sender, this technique successfully estimated the arrival times based on the interarrival time observations. In this study, we relax the requirement of equal transmission intervals and generalize our technique to handle bursty video applications.

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