Network-adaptive rate control with TCP-friendly protocol for multiple video objects

Delivering visual content over the Internet with acceptable quality is an important and challenging task. In order to maintain good quality of service (QoS) in the current best-effort Internet, bandwidth adaptation to the varying network conditions is desired for streaming video over the Internet. In this paper, we propose a new rate control scheme for streaming MPEG4 video containing multiple video objects in conjunction with a TCP-friendly transport protocol that dynamically estimates available network bandwidth on the fly. Furthermore, network packet loss rate is taken into account in rate adaptation so that the end-to-end distortion is minimized. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.