An optimal resource utilization scheme with end-to-end congestion control for continuous media stream transmission

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2005.06.005 Byline: Hongli Luo (a), Mei-Ling Shyu (a), Shu-Ching Chen (b) Keywords: Adaptive transmission rate; Quality-of-service (QoS); End-to-end congestion control; Network delay; TCP-friendly; Network resource optimization Abstract: In this paper, we propose an optimal resource utilization scheme with end-to-end congestion control for continuous media stream transmission. This scheme can achieve minimal allocation of bandwidth for each client and maximal utilization of the client buffers. By adjusting the server transmission rate in response to client buffer occupancy, playback requirements in the client, variations in network delays and the packet loss rate, an acceptable quality-of-service (QoS) level can be maintained at the end systems. Our proposed scheme can also achieve end-to-end TCP-friendly congestion control, which the multimedia flows can share fairly with the TCP flows instead of starving the TCP flows and the packet loss rate is reduced. Simulations to compare with different approaches under different network congestion levels and to show how our approach achieves end-to-end congestion control and inter-protocol fairness are conducted. The simulation results show that our proposed scheme can generally achieve high network utilization, low losses and end-to-end congestion control. Author Affiliation: (a) Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL 33124, USA (b) Distributed Multimedia Information System Laboratory, School of Computer Science, Florida International University, Miami, FL 33199, USA Article History: Received 5 November 2004; Revised 24 February 2005; Accepted 29 June 2005 Article Note: (miscellaneous) Responsible Editor: G. Morabito