Reducing multimedia transmission delay by shortening TCP acknowledgement route

Many multimedia applications employ transmission control protocol (TCP) to send video packets. TCP ensures reliable transmission but experiences significant delays. Various techniques have been proposed to enhance the performances, for instance by controlling TCP window. This paper proposes a split-routed acknowledgement packet that is aimed to reduce acknowledgement delay. The simulation evaluations show that the proposed method is able to reduce the existing TCP delay about 8.12% in average. The method can also be implemented in the existing TCP enhancement methods such as TCP Vegas where delay is successfully decreased down to 4.18%.