Optimal Multimedia Data Rate Control with Hop-by-Hop Approach in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Research on seamless multimedia data service has been interesting topic and its focus is moving towards wireless networks. Although some application layer schemes for supporting the multimedia data delivery in wired networks can be adapted in wireless ad hoc networks, networking schemes below the application layer cannot be used due to the time constraint, fairness problem, and unstable channel resided in wireless ad hoc networks. We propose a rate control algorithm at the transport layer to maximize the network throughput and fairness. Using the distributed hop-by-hop optimization with a utility function, we show that the controlled rate can be converged to an optimal solution without the oscillation.