Current TCP-friendly congestion control mechanisms adjust the packet rate in order to adapt to wired network conditions and obtain a throughput not exceeding that of a TCP connection operating under the same conditions. However, these mechanisms can not be directly applicable to wireless network because there is no way to distinguish congestion losses from wireless channel losses. In this letter, a new loss differentiation algorithm for wired-to-wireless streaming service is described. The approach does not only adjust the sending rate according to the network status, but also provide the useful feedback to the video encoder.

To accommodate best-effort multimedia Internet protocol (IP) connections in mobile environments, we introduced new criteria for TCP-friendliness and developed a control algorithm for the transient response and stability in the packet transmission rate. We improved the maximum throughput and QoS guaranteed congestion control algorithm (MAQS) by using these two solutions, and solved the following problems that Reno and conventional congestion control algorithms have: (1) network congestion cannot be avoided when the round-trip time (RTT) is short and the holding time is long, (2) the packet transmission rate of a long-RTT connection is small when it is multiplexed with short-RTT connections, (3) the packet transmission rate cannot be adjusted quickly when the channel capacity changes according to hand-off.