The effects of inter-packet spacing on the delivery of multimedia content

Streaming multimedia content with UDP has become increasingly popular over distributed systems such as the Internet. However, because UDP does not possess any congestion control mechanism and most best-effort traffic is served by the congestion-controlled TCP, UDP flows steal bandwidth from TCP to the point that TCP flows can starve for network resources. Furthermore, such applications may cause the Internet infrastructure to eventually suffer from congestion collapse because UDP traffic does not self-regulate itself. To address this problem, next-generation Internet routers will implement active queue management schemes to punish malicious traffic, e.g. non-adaptive UDP flows, and to the improve the performance of congestion-controlled traffic, e.g. TCP flows. The arrival of such routers will cripple the performance of today's UDP-based multimedia applications. So, in this paper, we introduce the notion of inter-packet spacing with control feedback to enable these UDP-based applications to perform well in the next-generation Internet while being adaptive and self-regulating. When compared with traditional UDP-based multimedia streaming, we illustrate that our counter-intuitive inter-packet spacing scheme with control feedback can reduce packet loss by 90% without adversely affecting the delivered throughput.