Nothing ruins the experience of watching a video stream more than a rebuffering stall. MARC is designed to deliver smooth video streaming over the Internet while remaining friendly to non-streaming traffic that uses TCP. Here we show how MARC can successfully protect a video stream from simulated network congestion that would normally cause the video stream to stall under TCP. We use two simulated congestion scenarios: (1) sudden onset of congestion such as caused by a flash-crowd of TCP connections, due to a site being slash-dotted for example, and (2) less drastic congestion glitches one normally finds in the daily running of the Internet. We show that under the demoed scenarios, the recently introduced TFRC also fails to protect the video stream from rebuffering stalls.

Video Demo:

QuickTime |  Windows Media |  Network traces The demo is also available in Chinese and German: Chinese: QuickTime |  Windows Media German: QuickTime |  Windows Media

The video clip used in this demo is Copyright (c) 2003 BMW of North America, LLC.

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• Z. Wang, S. Banerjee, and S. Jamin, "Media-Friendliness of a Slowly-Responsive Congestion Control Protocol", Proc. of Int'l Workshop on NOSSDAV 2004