Streaming agent for wired network/wireless link rate-mismatch environment

It has been shown that an agent located at the junction of wired and wireless links can help streaming media systems identify where packet losses occur and therefore maintain proper end-to-end congestion control. In this paper, we further expand the functionality of such agents in two ways. First, they allow streaming servers to identify the allowed transmission rate in both the wired and wireless parts of the path. Second, they serve as a relay to exploit the difference in transmission rate of the two parts. Simulation results show that PSNR improvement of over 2 dB can be achieved without extra bandwidth usage in the bottleneck links.