MPEG-4video transfer with TCP-friendly rate control

Abstract

It is widely known that network bandwidth is easily monopolized by distributed multimedia applications due to their greedy UDP traffic. In this paper, we propose TCP-friendly MPEG-4 video transfer methods which enable real time video applications to fairly shares the bandwidth with conventional TCP data applications. We consider how video applications should regulate video quality to adjust video rate to the desired sending rate which is determined by TCP-friendly rate control algorithm. Carelessly applying TCP-friendly rate variation to the video application would seriously degrade the application-level QoS. For example, the control interval should be long enough to avoid the fluctuation of video quality caused by too frequent rate control. However, popular TCP-friendly rate control algorithms recommend that a non-TCP session regulates its sending rate more than once a RTT. Through simulation experiments, it is shown that high-quality and stable video transfer can be accomplished by our proposed methods.