Estimating Packet Arrival Times in Bursty Video Applications

In retransmission-based error-control methods, the most fundamental yet the paramount problem is to determine how long the sender (or the receiver) should wait before deciding that an unacknowledged (or a missing) packet is lost. This waiting time is generally referred to as retransmission timeout (RTO). An accurate RTO estimation has two main advantages: First, the lost packets can be identified earlier, and hence, can be recovered faster. Second, redundant retransmissions can be avoided, which subsequently not only saves the network resources, but also helps existing network congestion alleviate sooner. Although it is statistically possible to prevent any unnecessary retransmission at the expense of long error-recovery times, such an approach can only be justified for data applications; it is not well-suited for delay-sensitive applications, for which the agility in recovering the lost packets is as important. With this motivation, we recently introduced an RTO estimation algorithm for delay-sensitive applications (A. C. Begen et al., 2004). Provided that the packets are transmitted at equal intervals, this technique successfully estimates the arrival times based on the interarrival-time observations. In this study, we relax the requirement of equal transmission intervals and generalize our technique to handle bursty video applications