Deadline and Priority-aware Congestion Control for Delay-sensitive Multimedia Streaming

Most applications of interactive multimedia require the data to arrive within the specific acceptable end-to-end latency (i.e., meeting deadline). To avoid efforts being wasted, the content must reach the destination before the deadline. In our work, we propose DAP (Deadline And Priority-aware congestion control) to achieve high throughput within acceptable end-to-end latency, especially to send high-priority packets while meeting deadline requirements. DAP is mainly composed of two modules: i) the scheduler decides which packet should be sent at first w.r.t the reward function with fully considering the packets' priority, deadline, and current network conditions. ii) the deadline-sensitive congestion control module transmits packets with high efficiency while guaranteeing the end-to-end latency. Specifically, we propose an improved packet-pair scheme to adjust the best congestion window corresponding to the Bandwidth-Delay Product and to update the instant sending rate by current queue length. Experimental results demonstrate the significant performance of our scheme and DAP ranks first in both the training phase and final phase of the ACM MM 2021 Grand Challenge: Meet Deadline Requirements.