MOS-Based Congestion Control for Conversational Services in Wireless Environments

Nowadays, multimedia applications and specifically streaming systems over wireless networks use the TCP transport protocol. Indeed, TCP can deal with practical issues such as firewalls and also deploys built-in retransmissions and congestion control mechanisms. We propose in this paper a Quality-centric Mean Opinion Score (MOS) based congestion control that determines an optimal congestion window updating policy for multimedia transmission. Unlike the standard congestion control algorithms, our approach defines a new Additive Increase Multiplicative Decrease (AIMD) algorithm given the multimedia application and the transmission characteristics. In order to get the optimal congestion policy in practice, the sender requires complete statistical knowledge of both multimedia traffic and the network environment, which may not be available in wireless systems. Hence, we propose in this paper, a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) framework in order to determine an optimal congestion control policy which maximizes the long term expected Quality of Experience (QoE) of the receiver. Moreover, the computation of an optimal policy is usually time/process consuming and as wireless devices are capacity-limited, we consider optimal solutions based on temporal difference (TD-λ) online learning algorithms. Finally, we do some practical experiments of our algorithm on a Microsoft Lync testbed with unidirectional and bidirectional communications over a wireless network. We observe that for both scenarios, our algorithm improves significantly the QoE compared to standard AIMD congestion control mechanism.