ABRC: an end-to-end rate adaptation scheme for multimedia streaming over wireless LAN

The rapid growth of wireless LAN (WLAN) deployments will bring about many novel mobile applications. Among them will be real-time multimedia streaming applications running on UDP, which may interfere with current data applications running on TCP. This paper is a first attempt to investigate how to ensure the performance of these two groups of applications when they co-exist over a WLAN. Toward this end, we have designed and implemented a UDP rate adaptation scheme called adaptive-buffer rate control (ABRC) for multimedia streaming over WLAN. ABRC has two distinguishing features compared with other schemes: 1) it can achieve arbitrary bandwidth allocations between UDP and TCP in the WLAN, as opposed Io previously proposed "TCP friendly" schemes, which can only achieve uniform bandwidth allocations; and 2) the majority of previously proposed flexible bandwidth-allocation schemes achieve arbitrary bandwidth allocations by prioritizing and scheduling packet transmissions within network equipment (i.e., within routers, base stations, etc.). In contrast, ABRC is an end-to-end application-layer solution that does not require changes to current WLAN products, making it more readily deployable over existing networks.