Quality-Driven TCP Friendly Rate Control for Real-Time Video Streaming

TCP Friendly Rate Control (TFRC) has been designed to provide smoother sending rate than TCP for multimedia applications. However, most existing work on TFRC is restricted within exploring the performance of TFRC itself in wired or wireless networks without considering the interaction between TFRC and other network layers. This paper proposes a quality- driven TFRC framework for real-time video streaming, where real-time video coding at the application layer and the packet sending rate at the transport layer are jointly optimized. The proposed framework is formulated to find the optimal video coding parameters and the sending rate to minimize the end- to-end expected video distortion under a given video playback delay constraint. The proposed framework has been implemented and tested by using both H.264/AVC codec and NS-2 simulator. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed joint optimization framework can significantly improve the received video quality over the existing schemes, especially when delay bound is tight.