Rate control for streaming video over wireless

Rate control is an important issue in video streaming applications for both wired and wireless networks. A widely accepted rate control method in wired networks is equation based rate control (Sally Floyd et al., Aug. 2000), in which the TCP friendly rate is determined as a function of packet loss rate, round trip time and packet size. This approach, also known as TFRC, assumes that packet loss in wired networks is primarily due to congestion, and as such is not applicable to wireless networks in which the bulk of packet loss is due to error at the physical layer. We propose multiple TFRC connections as an end-to-end rate control solution for wireless video streaming. We show that this approach not only avoids modifications to the network infrastructure or network protocol, hut also results in full utilization of the wireless channel. NS-2 simulations and experiments over 1×RTT CDMA wireless data network are carried out to validate, and characterize the performance of our proposed approach.