The fundamental challenge in streaming media over the Internet is to transfer the highest possible quality, adhere to the
media play out time constraint, and efficiently and fairly share the available bandwidth with TCP, UDP, and other traffic
types. This work introduces the Streaming Media Congestion Control protocol (SMCC), a new adaptive media streaming congestion
management protocol in which the connection’s packet transmission rate is adjusted according to the dynamic bandwidth share
of the connection. In SMCC, the bandwidth share of a connection is estimated using algorithms similar to those introduced
in TCP Westwood. SMCC avoids the Slow Start phase in TCP. As a result, SMCC does not exhibit the pronounced rate oscillations
characteristic of traditional TCP, thereby providing congestion control that is more suitable for streaming media applications.
Furthermore, SMCC is fair, sharing the bandwidth equitably among a set of SMCC connections. An important advantage is robustness
when packet losses are due to random errors, which is typical of wireless links and is becoming an increasing concern due
to the emergence of wireless Internet access. In the presence of random errors, SMCC is also friendly to TCP New Reno. We
provide simulation results using the ns2 simulator for our protocol running together with TCP New Reno.
This research was supported by NSF Grant ANI 9983138