A transmission control SCTP for real-time multimedia streaming

Multimedia streams over the Internet have a strict playback delay time, i.e., multimedia data arriving after the playback time cannot be played by the receiver and they are discarded. In this paper, we introduce a transmission control SCTP (TC-SCTP) which has a transmission control sub-layer (TCSL) in which the multimedia streaming server determines whether data can be played in the receiver before sending the data and decides whether to send data messages or not. In addition, TCSL employs differentiated retransmission policy depending on the type of multimedia. We evaluate the performances of SCTP, partial reliability (PR)-SCTP, and TC-SCTP via ns-2 simulator. The simulation results demonstrate that the TC-SCTP protocol can decrease the amount of transmissions and increase the video decodable ratio, compared with other protocols.