Evaluation of Single Rate Multicast Congestion Control Schemes for MPEG-4 Video Transmission

We present in this paper a simulation-based comparison of one of the best known multicast congestion control schemes - TFMCC - against our proposed adaptive smooth multicast protocol (ASMP). ASMP consists of a single-rate multicast congestion control, which takes advantage of the RTCP sender (SR) and receiver reports (RR) in order to adjust the sender's transmission rate in respect of the network conditions. The innovation in ASMP lays in the "smooth" transmission rate, which is TCP-friendly and prevent oscillations. We use an integrated simulation environment named Multi-Evalvid-RA for the evaluation of the two congestion control schemes. Multi-Evalvid-RA provides all the necessary tools to perform simulation studies and assess the video quality by using both network related metrics along with video quality measurements. The performance evaluation results show that ASMP is a very efficient solution for rate adaptive multimedia applications and a serious competitor to well know TFMCC.