L-TFRC: An end-to-end congestion control mechanism for video streaming over the Internet

Real-time multimedia applications over the Internet have posed a lot of challenges due to the lack of quality of service (QoS) guarantees, frequent fluctuations in channel bandwidth, and packet losses. To address these issues, a great deal of research has been done in both video coding and video transmission fields. In this paper we present a Logarithm-based TCP-Friendly Rate Control (L-TFRC) mechanism, which can estimate the available bandwidth more accurately and improve the smoothness of the multimedia streaming significantly. We also apply it to a Progressive Fine Granularity Scalable (PFGS)-based video streaming. Both simulations and experiments over the Internet confirm the performance of L-TFRC.