Adaptive Video Streaming in Presence of Wireless Errors

Abstract

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.

Rate control for streaming video over wireless

“…By effectively setting p w = 0, a Snoop-like module translates the new problem (rate control for streaming over wireless) into an old one (rate control for streaming over a wired network) for which a known solution exists. Similar observations can be made for other solutions such as the end-to-end statistics-based approaches [15][16][17][18][19][20][22][23][24][25][26].…”

“…End-to-end statistics can be used to help detect congestion when a packet is lost [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26]. For example, by examining trends in the oneway delay variation, Parsa and GarciaLunaAceves [25] interpret loss as a sign of congestion if one-way delays are increasing, and a sign of wireless channel error otherwise.…”

“…However, the high wireless error misclassification rate may result in underutilizing the wireless bandwidth, as shown in [18]. Yang et al [23] also propose a similar approach to improve video streaming performance in the presence of wireless error, under the assumption that the wireless link is the bottleneck.…”

“…This implies that if the available bandwidth is larger than the highest sending rate one TFRC can achieve, underutilization happens. In essence, the approaches taken in [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][22][23][24][25][26] ensure that the condition in Eq. 4 is not satisfied through modifications to network infrastructure or protocols.…”

Multiple TFRC Connections Based Rate Control for Wireless Networks

“…Consequently, There have been a number of efforts to improve the performance of TCP or TFRC over wireless [3]- [24]. These approaches either hide end-hosts from packet loss caused by wireless channel error, or provide end-hosts the ability to distinguish between packet loss caused by congestion, and that caused by wireless channel error.…”