Resource-aware and quality-fair video-streaming using multiple adaptive TCP connections

In this paper, we present a resource-aware and quality-fair video content sharing system. When a video sharing server has insufficient uplink bandwidth and needs to serve multiple video content sharing services via streaming or downloading to other client peers using TCP transport, each service shares the limited uplink bandwidth equitably, due to the fair sharing characteristics inherent in TCP. However this bandwidth fair sharing cannot always guarantee quality fairness among the services, due to the specific requirements for videostreaming services, such as the playout rate and the size of the playout buffer. In our system, the server uses multiple TCP connections adaptively, depending on the anticipated status of each client playout buffer, to guarantee the bandwidth of each video-streaming session. By guaranteeing the quality of each video-streaming session, without the quality loss of other service sessions, the proposed system can successfully achieve service quality fairness. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm can dramatically enhance the quality of each streaming session and thus provide service quality fairness among simultaneous multiple heterogeneous video-streaming services and content download services. 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.