Media- and TCP-friendly congestion control for scalable video streams

This paper presents a media- and TCP-friendly rate-based congestion control algorithm (MTFRCC) for scalable video streaming in the Internet. The algorithm integrates two new techniques: i) a utility-based model using the rate-distortion function as the application utility measure for optimizing the overall video quality; and ii) a two-timescale approach of rate averages (long-term and short-term) to satisfy both media and TCP-friendliness. We evaluate our algorithm through simulation and compare the results against the TCP-friendly rate control (TFRC) algorithm. For assessment, we consider five criteria: TCP fairness, responsiveness, aggressiveness, overall video quality, and smoothness of the resulting bit rate. Our simulation results manifest that MTFRCC performs better than TFRC for various congestion levels, including an improvement of the overall video quality.