Delay-sensitive and Priority-aware Transmission Control for Real-time Multimedia Communications

Today’s multimedia applications usually organize the contents into data blocks with different deadlines and priorities. Meeting/missing the deadline for different data blocks may contribute/hurt the user experience to different degrees. With the goal of optimizing real-time multimedia communications, the transmission control scheme needs to make two challenging decisions: the proper sending rate and the best data block to send under dynamic network conditions. In this paper, we propose a delay-sensitive and priority-aware transmission control scheme with two modules, namely, rate control and block selection. The rate control module constantly monitors the network condition and adjusts the sending rate accordingly. The block selection module classifies the blocks based on whether they are estimated to be delivered before deadline and then ranks them according to their effective priority scores. The extensive simulation results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed scheme over the other representative baseline approaches.