A Congestion Control Mechanism for Streaming Media Transmission over Wireless Environment

Abstract

TFRC (TCP-Friendly Rate Control Protocol) has been recognized as a relatively good mechanism for TCP friendly congestion control on cable network. However, TFRC is sensitive to the network status and cannot actually distinguish congestion losses and noncongestion losses well in wireless networks. The high error rates and large delay of wireless networks result in significant performance degradation and poor quality of the streaming media transmission service in transmission. To solve this problem, this paper proposes an Explicit Congestion Notification TCP (ECN-TCP) based TCP Friendly Wireless streaming Media Rate Control (TF-WMRC) congestion control mechanism. This mechanism improves TFRC and conjunctions with ECN and RED (Random Early Detection) methods, differentiating correctly congestion losses and wireless error losses and effectively alleviating the throughput degradation caused by wireless links. Performance evaluation of network efficiency, TCP friendliness and streaming media stability in NS2 simulation platform has shown that it is a good congestion control mechanism for streaming media transmission in wireless environment.