Abstract

Video data transfer is the major traffic in today’s Internet. With the emerging need for anytime anywhere communication, applications transmitting video is gaining momentum. Real Time Protocol is the primary standard for transfer of video data, as; it requires timely delivery and can tolerate loss of packets. Streaming is the method used for delivering video content from the source server to the user. But this has many drawbacks: a) It sends only the amount of data equivalent to the streaming encoded rate to the client irrespective of the available bandwidth in the path. Hence the links are underutilized; b) It utilizes the link for the entire period of transfer and hence the link is not available to service other new clients. Thus as the number of clients increases, the network performance decreases. In this work, the advantages and disadvantages of the combination of different protocols in the application layer and transport layer are analyzed. The significant characteristics of each of these protocols are utilized and a combination of protocols for improving the network performance is arrived at, while retaining the QoS of video transmission.