Contrary to the popular conventional wisdom that
the best transport protocol for the streaming media is UDP,
many findings found that most of the transport protocols used nowadays are TCP. Two main reasons that UDP is not being used widely are it is not friendly to other flows and some organizations are blocking this protocol. In the meantime,TCP is naturally reliable and friendly to other flows. But with so many controls inbuilt in the protocol; such as congestion control, flow control, and others with the heavy acknowledgement mechanism, resulting delays and jitters.Thus it’s naturally not friendly to the streaming media.But with all the inherited weaknesses, we have seen explosive growth of streaming media in the Internet. With these contrasting premises, it is very interesting to study and investigate the streaming media via TCP transport protocol,specifically on buffer and rate adaptation optimization
