Congestion Control and Adaptive Retransmission for Multimedia Streaming over Wireless Networks

Abstract

In wireless networks, congestion control, alone, may not be enough to ensure good quality of multimedia streaming and efficient utilization of the network. Packet losses due to the high bit error rate not only degrade the multimedia quality, but render the current congestion control algorithms as inefficient: these algorithms back-off on every packet loss even when there is no congestion. In this paper we study the case of pre-recorded multimedia streaming over wireless networks. We integrate the congestion control schemes with an adaptive retransmission scheme in order to selectively retransmit some lost multimedia packets. Moreover, we integrate a wireless loss estimation scheme to improve the efficiency of congestion control. Our results show that the integrated scheme improves the multimedia quality due to the retransmission and recovery of some of the lost multimedia data. Moreover, the congestion control schemes, and hence the integrated retransmission scheme, show improved performance because of the wireless loss estimation.