Joint design of source rate control and QoS-aware congestion control for video streaming over the Internet

Multimedia streaming over the Internet has been a very challenging issue due to the dynamic uncertain nature of the channels. This paper proposes an algorithm for the joint design of source rate control and congestion control for video streaming over the Internet. With the incorporation of a virtual network buffer management mechanism (VB), the quality of service (QoS) requirements of the application can be translated into the constraints of the source rate and the sending rate. Then at the application layer, the source rate control is implemented based on the derived constraints, and at the transport layer, a QoS-aware congestion control mechanism is proposed that strives to meet the send rate constraint derived from VB, by allowing temporary violation of transport control protocol (TCP)-friendliness when necessary. Long-term TCP-friendliness, nevertheless, is preserved by introducing a rate-compensation algorithm. Simulation results show that compared with traditional source rate/congestion control algorithms, this cross-layer design approach can better support the QoS requirements of the application, and significantly improve the playback quality by reducing the overflow and underflow of the decoder buffer, and improving quality smoothness, while maintaining good long-term TCP-friendliness.