CONTENT-AWARE TCP-FRIENDLY CONGESTION CONTROL FOR MULTIMEDIA TRANSMISSION

In this paper, we propose a content-aware congestion control for multimedia streaming over TCP/IP networks. Unlike existing congestion control schemes over the Internet that adapt a user's sending rate merely to the network condition, our solution adapts the sending rate to both the network condition and the application characteristics by explicitly considering the distortion impacts, delay deadlines, and interdependencies of different multimedia packet classes. The proposed media-aware solution models the congestion control problem using a Foresighted-Packet-Based optimization and determines the optimal congestion control policy that maximizes the long-term multimedia quality, while adhering to the horizon-TCP-friendliness constraint, which ensures long-term fairness with existing TCP applications. Our simulation results show that the content-aware congestion control achieves more than 3dB improvement in terms of PSNR over the conventional TCP congestion control approaches, with the largest improvements observed for real-time streaming applications requiring stringent playback delays.