Adaptive Multiple TCP-connection Scheme to Improve Video Quality over Wireless Networks

Due to the prevalence of powerful mobile terminals and the rapid advancements in wireless communication technologies, the wireless video streaming service has become increasingly more popular. Recent studies show that video streaming services via Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) are becoming more practical. TCP has more advantages than User Diagram Protocol (UDP), including firewall traversal, bandwidth fairness, and reliability. However, each video service shares an equal portion of the limited bandwidth because of the fair sharing characteristics inherent in TCP and this bandwidth fair sharing cannot always guarantee the video quality for each user. To solve this challenging problem, an Adaptive Multiple TCP (AM-TCP) scheme is proposed in this paper to guarantee the video quality for mobile devices in wireless networks. AM-TCP adaptively controls the number of TCP connections according to the video Rate Distortion (RD) characteristics of each stream and network status. The proposed scheme can minimize the total distortion of all participating video streams and maximize the service quality by guaranteeing the quality of each video streaming session. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme can significantly improve the quality of video streaming in wireless networks.