Measurement study of packet loss versus delay in congestion detection for video streaming

Abstract

A measurement study is conducted of video streaming across a testbed with routers typical of those found at bottlenecks on the wired Internet. During 'bursty' traffic packet loss is not always fairly distributed between background flows and a video stream. The paper shows that packet loss indications may be unreliable whereas packetby-packet delay, an alternative metric, has the ability to closely track queue length, responding to available bandwidth in a timely manner.