Multiple TFRC Connections Based Rate Control for Wireless Networks

Rate control is an important issue in video streaming applications for both wired and wireless networks. A widely accepted rate control method in wired networks is equation based rate control , in which the TCP friendly rate is determined as a function of packet loss rate, round trip time and packet size. This approach, also known as TCP friendly rate control (TFRC), assumes that packet loss in wired networks is primarily due to congestion, and as such is not applicable to wireless networks in which the bulk of packet loss is due to error at the physical layer. In this paper, we propose multiple TFRC connections as an end-to-end rate control solution for wireless video streaming. We show that this approach not only avoids modifications to the network infrastructure or network protocol, but also results in full utilization of the wireless channel. NS-2 simulations, actual experiments over 1$times$RTT CDMA wireless data network, and and video streaming simulations using traces from the actual experiments, are carried out to validate, and characterize the performance of our proposed approach.