Evaluating Streaming Rate Controllers: A Support Tool

The Internet has been experiencing a large growth of themultimedia traffic of applications performing over an RTP stackimplemented on top of UDP/IP. Since UDP does not offer a congestioncontrol mechanism (unlikely TCP), studies on the rate controlschemes have been increasingly done. Usually, new proposes areevaluated, by simulation, in terms of criteria such as fairnesstowards competing TCP connections and packet losses. However,results related to other performance aspects − qualityachieved, overhead introduced by the control, and actual throughputafter stream adaptation − are difficult to obtain bysimulation. In order to provide actual results about thesecriteria, we developed a comprehensive rate controlled videodelivery tool for testing RTP-based controllers. The tool allows toeasily incorporate new control schemes. In this paper, we describethe tool and the results achieved by using a LDA+ basedcontroller.