Communication Quality Improvement Method through End Host Enhancements for TFRC-type Mobile Streaming

Handover events are a source of instability in a mobile environment, but they are unavoidable. In particular, a significant cause of quality degradation is handovers to congested access points. These cause packet drops, longer RTT, and less available bandwidth for the flow being handed over. Such performance degradation may not be acceptable with respect to the transport protocols. Through simulations, we have investigated how the quality degradation occurs in such a scenario. Here, we introduce methods to improve communication quality through end host enhancements for TCP-friendly rate control algorithms. We have evaluated our proposed methods through simulations, and found that these methods enable substantially improved performance in terms of throughput and fairness with regard to the background flows.