Congestion Control for Scalable Video Streaming Using the Scalability Extension of H.264/AVC

This paper presents a streaming system using the scalability extension of H.264/AVC. The system provides a congestion control algorithm, which is supported by a channel bandwidth estimation running on the client. It uses retransmission only for packets from the base layer to limit the burden on the congested network. The bandwidth estimation allows the transmission rate to be quickly adjusted to the currently available bandwidth of the network. Compared to binomial congestion control, the proposed system allows for shorter start-up times and faster data rate adaptation. The paper describes the components of this streaming system and the results of experiments with competing UDP and TCP applications showing that the proposed approach reaches a throughput at least 50% higher than existing congestion control algorithms for streaming video without using more than the fair share of the bandwidth of the bottleneck link.