Receiver-driven bandwidth sharing for TCP and its application to video streaming

Applications using Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), such as web-browsers, ftp, and various peer-to-peer (P2P) programs, dominate most of the Internet traffic today. In many cases, users have bandwidth-limited last mile connections to the Internet which act as network bottlenecks. Users generally run multiple concurrent networking applications that compete for the scarce bandwidth resource. Standard TCP shares bottleneck link capacity according to connection round-trip time (RTT), and consequently may result in a bandwidth partition which does not necessarily coincide with the user´s desires. In this work, we present a receiver-based bandwidth sharing system (BWSS) for allocating the capacity of last-hop access links according to user preferences. Our system does not require modifications to the TCP protocol, network infrastructure or sending hosts, making it easy to deploy. By breaking fairness between flows on the access link, the BWSS can limit the throughput fluctuations of high-priority applications. We utilize the BWSS to perform efficient video streaming over TCP to receivers with bandwidth-limited last mile connections. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed system through Internet experiments.