Dynamic Quality Adaptation Mechanisms for TCP-friendly MPEG-4 Video Transfer

Abstract

When a considerable amount of UDP traffic is injected into the Internet by distributed multimedia applications, the Internet is easily driven congested. Consequently, bandwidth available to TCP connections is oppressed and their performance significantly deteriorates. In order that both multimedia applications and TCP-based ones fairly co-exist in the Internet, it becomes increasingly important to consider the inter-protocol fairness.In this paper, we propose a video quality adjustment mechanism which accomplishes the high-quality, stable, and TCP-friendly video transfer under a lossy environment in cooperation with the FEC (Forward Error Correction) technique. Our mechanism adjusts the video quality in accordance with the TFRC (TCP-Friendly Rate Control) rate, the packet loss probability, and the resultant video quality. Through simulation experiments, we show that our proposed method can provide high-quality, stable and TCP-friendly video transfer even in the unstable and lossy Internet.