TCP-friendly congestion control over heterogeneous wired/wireless IP network

Abstract

TCP-friendly congestion controls are widely accepted for video streaming over wired network, but not applicable to wire-less networks. For streaming video over wireless network where packets can be corrupted by wireless channel errors at the physical layer, conventional TCP-friendly congestion control should be revised. In this paper, wireless measurement based TCP-friendly rate control is introduced, which employs a new loss differentiation algorithm using packet loss statistics. Experimental results show that this method produces the TCP-friendly rates while sharing the backbone bandwidth with TCP flows because of eliminating the effect of wireless losses in flow control. As a result, the abrupt quality degradation of the video streaming over the unreliable wireless link status could be substantially reduced. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.