  Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) has emerged as an increasingly
popular paradigm for video streaming [13], in which a video is segmented into
many chunks delivered to users by HTTP request/response over Transmission
Control Protocol (TCP) con- nections. Therefore, it is intriguing to study the
performance of strategies implemented in conventional TCPs, which are not
dedicated for video streaming, e.g., whether chunks are efficiently delivered
when users per- form interactions with the video players. In this paper, we
conduct mea- surement studies on users chunk requesting traces in DASH from a
rep- resentative video streaming provider, to investigate users behaviors in
DASH, and TCP-connection-level traces from CDN servers, to investi- gate the
performance of TCP for DASH. By studying how video chunks are delivered in both
the slow start and congestion avoidance phases, our observations have revealed
the performance characteristics of TCP for DASH as follows: (1) Request
patterns in DASH have a great impact on the performance of TCP variations
including cubic; (2) Strategies in conventional TCPs may cause user perceived
quality degradation in DASH streaming; (3) Potential improvement to TCP
strategies for better delivery in DASH can be further explored.
