Adaptive Rate Optimal Design for Wireless Heterogeneous Networks: Jointly Congestion Discrimination and Queue Updating

In this paper, we propose a novel rate adaptive optimization scheme for streaming media transmission over wireless heterogeneous IP networks. In the proposed adaptive scheme, through the analysis of the packet loss characteristics in wireless channel, we develop the relationship between the packet loss rates and the packet sizes. Furthermore, the scheme detects the nature of packet losses by sending large and small packets alternately, and then adopts an adaptive rate optimization strategy to decrease the network congestion and increase the network throughput. Using congestion discrimination and updating factor, the scheme can adapt to the changes of network states quickly and improve delivery quality of wireless multimedia streaming. Simulation results show that, in comparisons to the existing rate optimization algorithms, our proposed scheme offers significantly improved performance in terms of throughput and network congestion, especially when the channel quality is poor in different network topology environments.