An adaptive control scheme for real-time media streaming over wireless networks

Abstract

Real time video streaming over wireless networks is not trivial because of the two characteristics of the wireless networks - (1) smaller bandwidth and (2) unreliable transmission media. An adaptive real-time video streaming scheme that uses the layered video technique is proposed. Two attributes that are used to determine the network situation and then adjust the sending rate accordingly are loss rate and round trip time (RTT). Since the unreliable media cause of packet loss in the wireless environment is rate-independent, a method that can separate the rate-independent loss from the congestion loss is needed. We use inter-arrival time between two received packets to identify if an out of order packet was received in time to do the packet loss separating. When a congestion situation is determined, the sending rate of the sender is dropped down one layer; when an unloaded situation is determined, the sending rate of the sender is raised up one layer. In this way, the adaptive real-time video streaming can be achieved for wireless networks.