TCP-ROME: A transport-layer parallel streaming protocol for real-time online multimedia environments

Real-time multimedia streaming over the Internet is rapidly increasing with the popularity of user-created contents, Web 2.0 trends, and P2P (peer-to-peer) delivery support. While many homes today are broadband-enabled, the quality of experience (QoE) of a user is still limited due to frequent interruption of media playout. The vulnerability of TCP (transmission control protocol), the popular transport-layer protocol for streaming in practice, to the packet losses, retransmissions, and timeouts makes it hard to deliver a timely and persistent flow of packets for online multimedia contents. This paper presents TCP-real-time online multimedia environment (ROME), a novel transport-layer framework that allows the establishment and coordination of multiple many-to-one TCP connections. Between one client with multiple home addresses and multiple co-located or distributed servers, TCP-ROME increases the total throughput by aggregating the re- sources of multiple TCP connections. It also overcomes the band- width fluctuations of network bottlenecks by dynamically coordinating the streams of contents from multiple servers and by adapting the streaming rate of all connections to match the bandwidth requirement of the target video.