Graduation date: 2007Packet loss, delay and time-varying bandwidth are three main problems facing multimedia streaming applications over the Internet. Existing techniques such as Media-aware network protocol, network adaptive source and channel coding, etc. have been proposed to either overcome or alleviate these drawbacks of the Internet. But these techniques either need specialized codecs or require significant changes in the network infrastructure. In this thesis, we propose the MultiTCP system, a receiver-driven, TCP-based application-layer transmission protocol for multimedia streaming over the Internet. The proposed algorithm aims at providing resilience against SHORT TERM insufficient bandwidth by using MULTIPLE TCP connections for the same application. Our proposed system enables the application to achieve and control the desired sending rate during congested periods, by using multiple TCP connections and dynamically changing the receiver's window size for each connection, which cannot be achieved using traditional TCP. Finally, the proposed system is implemented at the application layer. Thus no kernel modification is necessary, which ensures easy deployment. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed system, we present simulation and experimental results on the PlanetLab network to establish its advantages over the traditional single TCP based approach.