Improving TCP-Friendly Rate Control in Wired and Wireless Networks By a Scheme Based on Wireless Signal Strength

We propose a rate control scheme developed to improve TFRC (TCP-Friendly Rate Control) in wired and wireless networks. Next-generation wireless users will expect multimedia streams of high quality as well as high mobility that has time-varying wireless error rate. The proposed scheme is designed to meet such requirements. This is accomplished by using wireless signal strength information to improve wireless TFRC performance. Most wireless devices currently have wireless signal strength information in the driver level. In Windows XP, our scheme can be implemented by a slight modification of the TFRC algorithm in the application level through the use of WRAPI 2.0. To evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme, we simulated several cases over a wireless network via the NS-2 simulator and compared the efficiency of delivery exhibited by the proposed scheme with that of existing schemes. The proposed scheme is robust to congestion loss and wireless loss. In addition, our scheme exhibits stable performance even in timevarying wireless conditions.