Design and Implementation of a Rate Control Mechanism for Image-based Virtual Exploration over Wireless Networks

Abstract

In recent years, we have witnessed a growing interest in multimedia streaming applications over wireless networks. However, while a number of wireless multimedia applications have already been proposed, many issues related to bandwidth management of 3D multimedia streaming over wireless networks remains one of the most challenging task one has to deal with. In this paper, we propose an adaptive rate control algorithm that uses an immediate feedback mechanism in order to determine the network status. In our scheme, both packet loss and round-trip time are used as indicators of whether or not a network is congested, so as to differentiate end-to-end traffic congestion from wireless link errors. Furthermore, in order to pre-fetch images to the client, we propose to use a motion prediction technique. We discuss our schemes, describe their implementation, and present an extensive set of simulation experiments in order to evaluate their performance using ns-2 simulator.