ECN based TCP-friendly rate control for wireless multimedia streaming

Streaming multimedia (video/audio) over wireless access networks has problems of lower throughput and poor performance due to inherent wireless network characteristics of packet corruption. Solutions such as UDP-Lite are available that partially mitigate the effect of packet corruption over wireless hop. Meanwhile, because streaming applications preferably use unregulated UDP as transport protocol, there is an increasing need to regulate these streams for being friendly to other simultaneous flows. Recently, several slowly responsive congestion control algorithms such as TCP-Friendly Rate Control (TFRC) appropriate for real time streaming applications were proposed. However, this loss based TFRC doesn't work well in wireless scenario because it was designed for wired networks and it accounts wireless losses also as congestion losses. TFRC also suffers from degraded performance due to packet reordering in the Internet. Suggestions have been made to have a rate control mechanism based on ECN marking, which works well in wireless scenarios. We propose that ECN-based TFRC can also be robust to packet reordering. We first tested a combination of UDP-Lite and loss based TFRC for wireless streaming. Subsequently, we performed several experiments to study the robustness of ECN-based TFRC to both the losses over wireless hop and packet reordering in the Internet.