Adaptive video streaming in presence of wireless errors

Abstract

Real-time video streaming with rate adaptation to network load/congestion represents an efficient solution to its coexistence with conventional TCP data services. Naturally, the streaming rate control must be efficient, smooth and TCP friendly. As multimedia clients become mobile, these properties must be preserved also over wireless links. In particular, they must be robust to random wireless losses. Existing schemes such as TCP Friendly Rate Control (TFRC) perform well in the wired Internet, but show serious performance degradation in the presence of random wireless losses. In this paper we introduce the Video Transport Protocol (VTP) with a new rate control mechanism based on the Achieved Rate (AR) estimation and Loss Discrimination Algorithm. We show that VTP can preserve efficiency without causing additional performance degradation to TCP, in both error-free and error-prone situations. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2004.