End-to-End Differentiation of Congestion and Wireless Losses

In this paper, the authors explore end-to-end Loss Differentiation Algorithms (LDAs) for use with congestion-sensitive video transport protocols for networks with either backbone or last-hop wireless links. As their basic video transport protocol, they use UDP in conjunction with a congestion control mechanism extended with an LDA. For congestion control, they use the TCP-Friendly Rate Control (TFRC) algorithm. They extend TFRC to use an LDA when a connection uses at least one wireless link in the path between the sender and receiver. They then evaluate various LDAs under different wireless network topologies, competing traffic, and fairness scenarios to determine their effectiveness.