TECHNIQUES AND PROTOCOLS FOR DISTRIBUTED MEDIA STREAMING

Abstract

Distributed media streaming employs multiple senders to cooperatively and simultaneously transmit a media stream to a receiver over the Internet. Having multiple senders have lead to both sender and path diversity and improved robustness in the system. But at the same time, distributed media streaming has raised many challenging and interesting research problems. In this dissertation, first, we study how to improve streaming quality through distributed retransmission -- retransmission from alternate senders rather than the origin of the lost packet. Second, we investigate the issue of TCP-friendliness in distributed media streaming, study the importance of having aggregate congestion control, and design a congestion control protocol to achieve the purpose. Third, we propose TCP Urel, an unreliable, congestion-controlled transport protocol for media streaming.