Transmission protocols for streaming video over wireless

Abstract

Rate control is an important issue in video streaming applications for both wired and wireless networks. A widely accepted rate control method in wired networks is TCP friendly equation based rate control (S. Floyd et al., Aug 2000), i.e. TFRC. However, it assumes that packet loss in wired networks is primarily due to congestion, and as such is not applicable to wireless networks in which the bulk of packet loss is due to error at the physical layer. In this work, we show multiple TFRC connection is an efficient end-to-end rate control solution for wireless video streaming applications. The approach not only avoids modifications to the network infrastructure or network protocol, but also results in full utilization of the wireless channel. Video streaming related simulations arc carried out to show the efficiency of our proposed approach.