Explicit feedback notification for transporting multimedia streaming flows over the Internet

As the capacity of Internet service providers (ISP) increases, it allows a massive deployment of multimedia applications over the Internet that poses additional challenges to congestion and quality of service management. Hence, this scenario requires the implementation of mechanisms that assure smooth rate variation (media friendliness) as well as a TCP-friendly behavior. In this paper, we perform a quantitative evaluation of the end-user perceived media quality of video streaming under some recent proposed network friendly protocols in the best-effort Internet. We evaluated the effect of throughput variation of the protocols on the PSNR when transmitting MPEG-4 video files. To do that, we carried out a set of experiments under the congestion avoidance and distributed proportional control and framework and TCP-friendly rate control protocol. Simulation results have shown that application-level protocol should rely on the explicit feedback notification from the network in order to provide the streaming media with both uninterrupted transport services and low intensity variation in quality