A new fast friendly window-based congestion control for real-time streaming media transmission

Real-time streaming media over the Internet is an important component of multimedia applications. For the sake of quality of service (QoS), they make rigid demands on bandwidth, delay and packet loss. However, the current Internet does not offer any QoS guarantees to real-time streaming media over it. How to maximize the transmission quality of real-time streaming applications in a best-effort network while friendly sharing bandwidth with non-real time applications like TCP has become an important issue. But now, many real-time streaming applications based on UDP rarely perform congestion control in a TCP-friendly manner, and they do not share the available bandwidth fairly with applications built on TCP. The Internet communication strongly fears that the current evolution could lead to congestion collapse and starvation of TCP traffic. For this reason, TCP-friendly protocols are being developed to behave fairly with respect to coexistent TCP flows. In this paper we present a new window-based congestion control method-fast fair binomial congestion control (FFBCC) for real-time applications. It provides a good performance of bandwidth distribution and TCP-friendliness for real-time streaming transmission while competing bandwidth with TCP flows.