A Rate Control Mechanism Based on Client Feedback for Transporting MPEG-4 Video over the Internet

Abstract

With the popularity of the Internet and the flexibility of MPEG-4 encoding, transporting MPEG-4 video in the Internet will be an important component of multimedia applications in the near future. Unlike other applications, video applications typically have limitations in packet delay and packet loss, which cannot be guaranteed by the current Internet. It is an important issue to design a congestion control mechanism of MPEG-4 delivery system that can minimize delay and packet loss to maximize the perceptual quality of service. We present a congestion control mechanism based on the client-server model. The video server adjusts the data output rate depending on the perceived network feedback from the video client to avoid delay and loss. The client keeps track of the video data received to estimate the future output rate as the feedback for the server. This mechanism is thus referred to as rate control mechanism based on client feedback. It can rapidly adjust the output data rate close to the bandwidth available and utilize network resources efficiently. The experimental results obtained via simulation shows that the proposed system is satisfactory.