The Effect of Block-wise Feedback on the Throughput-Delay Trade-off in Streaming
This addresses the problem of optimizing streaming performance for applications with delay constraints and bandwidth limitations, representing an incremental improvement in understanding feedback effects.
The paper tackles the trade-off between throughput and in-order decoding delay in streaming applications, showing that immediate feedback allows optimal performance on both metrics, but increasing feedback delay forces compromises, with the authors presenting a spectrum of coding schemes to span different points on this trade-off.
Unlike traditional file transfer where only total delay matters, streaming applications impose delay constraints on each packet and require them to be in order. To achieve fast in-order packet decoding, we have to compromise on the throughput. We study this trade-off between throughput and in-order decoding delay, and in particular how it is affected by the frequency of block-wise feedback to the source. When there is immediate feedback, we can achieve the optimal throughput and delay simultaneously. But as the feedback delay increases, we have to compromise on at least one of these metrics. We present a spectrum of coding schemes that span different points on the throughput-delay trade-off. Depending upon the delay-sensitivity and bandwidth limitations of the application, one can choose an appropriate operating point on this trade-off.