Experimental study of low-latency HD VoD streaming using flexible dual TCP-UDP streaming protocol

The Flexible Dual TCP-UDP Streaming Protocol (FDSP) combines the reliability of TCP with the low latency characteristics of UDP. FDSP delivers the more critical parts of the video data via TCP and the rest via UDP. Bitstream Prioritization (BP) is a sliding scale that is used to determine the amount of TCP data that is to be sent. BP can be adjusted according to the level of network congestion. FDSP-based streaming achieves lower rebuffering time and less rebuffering instances than TCP-based streaming as well lower packet loss than UDP-based streaming. Our implementation and experiments on a real testbed shows that FDSP with BP delivers high quality, low-latency video, which is especially suitable for live video and subscription-based video.