Streaming Media Applications

Streaming media applications are typically more sensitive to network losses than delay since delay variations can be masked by using a buffer at the client. OverQoS is an ideal platform for providing different forms of enhancements for such applications. Two such forms of enhancements are:

1. The quality of streaming audio can be enhanced by converting bursty losses into smooth losses.
2. By preferentially recovering packets in an MPEG stream, one can improve the quality of the video stream.

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Given that delay variations is not a primary issue for these applications, OverQoS primarily uses an ARQ-based CLVL for these applications. For both streaming audio and video, OverQoS does not consume any additional bandwidth. It achieves this by performing the following operation: Whenever an important packet is lost in the network, OverQoS retransmits this packet and drops a later lesser important packet to compensate for the retransmission. In the process, the application observes the same end-to-end loss-rate as it would in the normal Internet and will experience an occasional increase in the end-to-end delay which is bounded by the $RTT$ along the overlay path.