Real-time constrained TCP-compatible rate control for video over the Internet

This paper describes a rate control algorithm that captures not only the behavior of TCP's congestion control avoidance mechanism but also the delay constraints of real-time streams. Building upon the TFRC protocol [11, a new protocol has been designed for estimating the bandwidth prediction model parameters. Making use of RTP and RTCP, this protocol allows to better take into account the multimedia flows characteristics (variable packet size, delay...). Given the current channel state estimated by the above protocol, encoder and decoder buffers states as well as delay constraints of the real-time video source are translated into encoder rate constraints. This global rate control model, coupled with an H.263+ loss resilient video compression algorithm, has been extensively experimented with on various Internet links. The experiments clearly demonstrate the benefits of 1/ the new protocol used for estimating the bandwidth prediction model parameters, adapted to multimedia flows characteristics, and of 2/ the global rate control model encompassing source buffers and end-to-end delay characteristics. The overall system leads to reduce significantly the source timeouts, hence to minimize the expected distortion, for a comparable usage of the TCP-compatible predicted bandwidth.