TCP Compatible Greediness Control Algorithm for Wireless Multimedia Streaming

This paper proposes a TCP compatible greediness control mechanism that tunes the greediness of the multimedia streaming process based on client priority, in order to make more efficient use of the wireless network and increase the overall user perceived quality. The majority of streaming solutions use rate adaptation based on congestion avoidance mechanisms that try to obtain as much bandwidth as possible from the limited network resources. However the lack of both knowledge about the characteristics of target devices, cross-layer communication and cross-protocol interaction results in fair bandwidth distribution at the transport layer, but creates unfairness at the application layer. This unfairness mostly affects user perceived quality when streaming high quality multimedia. Therefore, there is a need to allow application layer streaming applications tune the aggressiveness of transport layer congestion control mechanisms, in order to create application layer Quality of Experience fairness between competing media streams, by taking their device characteristics into account