UDP-based Extremely Low Latency Streaming

Recently, with the rapid development of network and mobile device technologies, the number of services based on video streaming increased drastically. Most streaming applications such as YouTube, Netflix, and Twitch utilize large size buffers (over 1 s) to absorb sudden network dynamics. Before the buffer is depleted, lost packets are retransmitted, thus allowing users to enjoy watching video without recognizing network changes. However, some applications such as remote surgery and game streaming require extremely low end-to-end latency of less than 30 ms. We propose a streaming method suitable for such special streaming applications that need to transfer video with a very short latency. For this purpose, timeliness is paramount and we use UDP rather than TCP. To recover packet losses in a timely manner, we mainly utilize Forward Error Correction (FEC) rather than retransmissions that require time longer than round trip time. The proposed scheme consistently monitors real-time network conditions to decide the appropriate data rate and FEC parameters. Through extensive evaluations, we show that the proposed scheme efficiently achieves both timeliness and high robustness to packet losses.