Enhanced Transport Protocols for Real Time and Streaming Applications

Real time communications have, in the last decade, become a highly relevant component of Internet applications and services, with both interactive (voice & video) communications and streamed content. Due to the proliferation of mobile devices, wireless media is becoming the means of transmitting a large part of this real time traffic. Wireless has also become an important technology in developing countries (and remote areas of developed countries), with satellite communications being increasingly deployed for traffic backhaul and ubiquitous connection to the Internet. The availability of multiple wireless interfaces on mobile devices presents an opportunity to improve and further exacerbates the issues already present on single wireless links. Link errors originating from the wireless media, addressing packet reordering, jitter, link and buffering delays, etc. all contribute to lowering user's quality of experience and perception of network quality and usability. Therefore in this work, we consider in-depth improvements to transport protocols for real time communications and streaming services to address these problems.