Joint Design of Source Rate Control and QoS-Aware Congestion Control for Video Streaming over the Internet

This paper proposes an algorithm for joint design of source rate control and congestion control for video streaming over the Internet. At the application layer, with the incorporation of a virtual network buffer management mechanism (VB), the QoS requirements of the application can be translated into the constraints of the source rate and the send rate. At the transport layer, a QoS-aware congestion control mechanism is proposed that strives to meet the send rate constraint derived from VB, by allowing temporary violation of TCP-friendliness when necessary. Long-term TCP-friendliness, nevertheless, is preserved by introducing a rate compensation algorithm. Simulation results show that compared with traditional source rate/congestion control algorithms, this cross-layer design approach can significantly improve the playback quality by reducing the overflow and underflow of the decoder buffer, and improving quality smoothness, while maintaining long-term TCP-friendliness