A Two-Stream Approach for Priority Management and Adaptive Rate Control in Multimedia Applications

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a two-stream approach for adaptive rate control in multimedia applications. By monitoring a low-rate monitoring stream, we keep track of the available bandwidth (AB) of the network path and dynamically adjust the sending rate of the traffic stream close to the optimal rate. We also assure the higher priority of the monitoring stream in that the traffic stream is not allowed to affect the transmission of the monitoring stream. The proposed two-stream approach perfectly meets the requirements of the current best-effort Internet and fits well in multimedia applications. For example, there is no bandwidth overhead for the monitoring stream in peer-to-peer video conferencing, because the monitoring stream is the audio stream. We show in our experiments that both the network and the application can benefit from this approach. The proposed two-stream approach is applicable to monitor the sending rate of the traffic stream over UDP as well as over TCP.