Rate-control for conversational video communication in heterogeneous networks

Heterogeneous networks are made up of wireless and wired links. The wireless link quality may vary due to interference and fading phenomena and, peered with radio and link layer reconfigurations lead to varying error rates, latencies, and, most importantly, changes in the available bit rate. In both fixed and wireless networks, varying amounts of cross traffic from other nodes may lead to fluctuations in queue size (reflected again in a path latency) and to congestion (reflected in packet drops from router queues). We propose a rate-adaptation algorithm for conversational video communication in a heterogeneous environment and use the standardized RTCP extensions as a starting point. We use metrics such as PSNR, loss rate, bandwidth utilization and fairness to evaluate the proposed algorithm.