Source Controlled and Delay Sensitive Selective Retransmission Scheme for Multimedia Streaming

Multimedia applications are becoming increasingly popular in IP networks, while in mobile environment the limited bandwidth and the higher error rate arise in spite of its popularity. The wireless network characteristics make the deployment of these applications more challenging. Retransmission-based error recovery is considered inappropriate for multimedia applications, because of its latency. However, this solution can be attractive because it requires minimal network bandwidth and processing cost as well as improvement of the video quality. Despite its latency, retransmission can be used successfully in many cases, especially if playout buffering is employed. In this paper we propose a source controlled and playout time oriented retransmission scheme for multimedia streaming. Due to source controlling the receiver do not need to send additional retransmission request messages. The other advantage of transmitter controlled decision algorithm is that all the needed information is available at the source due to DCCP transport protocol. Therefore no additional network measurements and probe messages are needed. The results show that our scheme reduces traffic overhead generated by retransmission and hardly degrades the number of unsuccessfully retransmitted packets at all.