A novel rate control scheme for video streaming over wireless networks

TFRC is an equation-based rate control scheme originally developed for media streaming over wired networks. When applied to the wireless networks, it suffers from performance degradation. In this paper, we propose a loss event rate discounting (LERD) scheme to improve the TFRC performance over wireless networks. In our TFRC-LERD scheme, a TFRC connection includes several loss discounting levels. We increase the discounting level of the TFRC connection when the wireless bandwidth is under-utilized, and decrease it when the wireless bandwidth is overestimated. The adjusting of discounting level conforms to the inverse increase additive decrease algorithm. In contrast with most existing solutions, our scheme only employs the general statistical information and does not need to determine the cause of each packet loss, which reduces the computational complexity. In addition, TFRC-LERD is an end-to-end solution and does not assume any additional support from intermediate networks or lower layers. Simulation results demonstrate that our scheme outperforms the original TFRC under a wide range of error rates and the video quality perceived by the receiver is improved considerably.