An Analytical Framework to Evaluate the Effects of a TCP-Friendly Congestion Control over Adaptive-Rate MPEG Video Sources

In the last few years researchers have made great effort to design TCP-friendly UDP-based congestion control procedures to be applied to realtime applications; however, very little effort has been devoted to investigating how real-time sources can be designed under TCP-friendly bandwidth constraints. In this perspective, this paper investigates the effects of the bandwidth variation rate during bandwidth profile variations on both the error of the rate controller in fitting the bandwidth profile, and the distortion introduced by the quantization mechanism of the MPEG video encoder. To this end we introduce an SBBP/SBBP/1/K queueing system modeling an MPEG video source where a feedback law is used to provide rate adaptation. The proposed paradigm addresses any feedback law, provided that the parameter to be varied is the quantizer scale.