Trickle: Rate Limiting YouTube Video Streaming
Venue
Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference (2012), pp. 6
Publication Year
2012
Authors
Monia Ghobadi, Yuchung Cheng, Ankur Jain, Matt Mathis
BibTeX
Abstract
YouTube traffic is bursty. These bursts trigger packet losses and stress router
queues, causing TCP’s congestion-control algorithm to kick in. In this paper, we
introduce Trickle, a server-side mechanism that uses TCP to rate limit YouTube
video streaming. Trickle paces the video stream by placing an upper bound on TCP’s
congestion window as a function of the streaming rate and the round-trip time. We
evaluated Trickle on YouTube production data centers in Europe and India and
analyzed its impact on losses, bandwidth, RTT, and video buffer under-run events.
The results show that Trickle reduces the average TCP loss rate by up to 43% and
the average RTT by up to 28% while maintaining the streaming rate requested by the
application.
