Practical rate control for video over WLAN
Transmission Rate control is an important issue for video streaming applications, particularly for mobile consumer devices in wireless network. We propose two rate control algorithms to enhance the performance of 802.11 streaming, where practical problems are taken into account, including the RTT fluctuation and real packet loss events. Extended from our wired TFRC [1], the first scheme, named as congestion differentiated rate control (CDRC), predicts the network status based on RTT and packet loss events feedback from the receiver. The second scheme is based on the cross layer strategy, named as WiQ-X, where the frame error rate in PHY layer helps to estimate the channel status and adapt the sending rate. Practical experiments show that both of our schemes can achieve stable transmission and high quality of video streaming, especially in the bad channel conditions. KeywordsWireless LAN, rate control, congestion control, congestion differentiated, cross-layer structure