High Quality Video Streaming with SCTP over CDMA2000

Abstract

The research reported in this thesis investigates the performance of the transport layer Stream Control Transfer Protocol (SCTP) for streaming video over CDMA2000 cellphone and data wireless networks. The main measure of performance was quality of the received video at a given buffer size, as cellphones have memory of limited capacity. The hypothesis was that SCTP would be able to improve the quality of streamed video over UDP under the same memory requirements. Our study involved two series of simulation experiments and measurements in a testbed on the Telecom NZ CDMA2000 network, to test the performance of video streaming under SCTP and under UDP. It was found that SCTP did not improve the quality in streamed video with up to 5 second buffers. While other scenarios that have been tested by other people with high packet loss or congestion have shown that SCTP can improve the quality, the CDMA2000 network does not suffer from the impairments that SCTP could neutralise, and because of that, in this scenario, the quality of video streaming under SCTP and UDP are similar. The complexity that SCTP adds does not correspond to an increase in quality.