Multimedia Congestion Control for Broadband Wireless Networks

Multimedia applications have seen an exponential growth within the Internet. Most applications currently use UDP as their underlying transport protocol and transmit at the maximum rate allowed by the application, irrespective of other traffic. This raises fairness issues when used in the general Internet, and the possibility of starvation of other packet flows. The applications therefore need to evolve to use a congestion control protocol. A new protocol called the DCCP was therefore proposed by the IETF to allow efficient delivery of multimedia applications while also being able to detect and respond to network congestion. This paper investigates this topic relating this to multimedia transmission over broadband wireless (including satellite) networks, especially when such networks are integrated in the next generation Internet.