1. Field of the Invention
This invention pertains in general to the effective use of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) for the transport of multimedia content.
2. Description of the Related Art
Multimedia content (e.g., video and music) is frequently exchanged over the Internet from a server to a client. To transmit data to a client, a server uses some type of communication protocol. One of the protocols that may be used is Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). TCP guarantees delivery of a stream of data from a server to a client by using a positive acknowledgment technique. When a server sends a data segment to a client, the server expects the client to respond with an acknowledgment message once the client receives the segment. If the client does not respond with the acknowledgment message within a set amount of time, it means that the data segment was lost or corrupted. In response, the server retransmits the data segment to the client. The problem with TCP is that it is optimized for accurate delivery rather than timely delivery. Therefore, the delivery of data may incur long delays because of the wait for retransmissions of lost segments.
Since the delivery of multimedia data in most cases requires fast delivery, servers often use User Datagram Protocol (UDP). UDP is faster than TCP because it does not guarantee delivery of data. UDP never verifies whether a data segment was received by a client. Additionally, UDP drops any segment that is received out of order. Therefore, the client will not have access to all of the data sent by the server.