Enhancing Video Streaming Delivery Over Wired/Wireless Networks

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is basically designed to provide a reliable service for wired Internet. The Additive Increase Multiplicative Decrease (AIMD) algorithm, incorporated into standard TCP versions, achieves stability and converges to fairness when the demand of competing flows exceeds the channel bandwidth. However, most existing TCP mechanisms do not satisfy the need for universal functionality in heterogeneous wired/wireless environments, since they do not flexibly adjust the rate and pattern of the transmitted multimedia streams to the characteristics of the end-to-end network path.