A learning based congestion control for multimedia transmission in wireless networks

Abstract

The intense throughput and stringent delay requirements of Internet multimedia applications has spurred the need for new transport protocols with flexible transmission control. Current TCP congestion control adopts an Additive Increase Multiplicative Decrease (AIMD) algorithm that linearly increases or exponentially decreases the congestion window based on transmission acknowledgements. In this paper, we propose an AIMD-based media-aware congestion control that determines the optimal congestion window updating policy for multimedia transmission. The media-aware congestion control is formulated as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP), which maximizes the long-term expected quality of the received multimedia data. Moreover, we propose a reinforcement learning algorithm in order to estimate the environment and adapt to the source and network variations on the fly. Simulation results show that the proposed approach can significantly improve the received video quality, particularly at high source rates, compared to conventional TCP.