Real-time streaming over wireless links: a comparative study

Real-time streaming over wireless links is challenging. The streaming protocol must be efficient and robust to random wireless loss, fair to itself, and friendly to legacy TCP. Various solutions have been proposed in the literature, among which the video transport protocol (VTP), TFRC wireless, and MULTFRC are end-to-end representatives. In this paper we provide an in-depth comparison on the performance of VTP, TFRC wireless, and MULTFRC in various wireless scenarios. The results show that VTP and TFRC wireless both perform well and deliver similar performance, with VTP exhibiting greater efficiency and smoothness in presence of heavy errors. In contrast, MULTFRC performs less satisfactorily, as it experiences large rate fluctuation and slow convergence caused by the frequent changes in the number of simultaneous connections.