Flow control of real-time unicast multimedia applications in best-effort networks

One of the fastest growing segments of Internet applications are real-time multimedia applications, like Voice over Internet Protocol ( VoIP). Real-time multimedia applications use the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) as the transport protocol because of the inherent conservative nature of the congestion avoidance schemes of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). The effects of uncontrolled flows on the Internet have not yet been felt because UDP traffic frequently constitutes only ∼20% of the total Internet traffic. It is pertinent that real-time multimedia applications become better citizens of the Internet, while at the same time deliver acceptable Quality of Service (QoS).;Traditionally, packet losses and the increase in the end-to-end delay experienced by some of the packets characterizes congestion in the network. These two signals have been used to develop most known flow control schemes. The current research considers the flow accumulation in the network as the signal for use in flow control. The most significant contribution of the current research is to propose novel end-to-end flow control schemes for unicast real-time multimedia flows transmitting over best-effort networks. These control schemes are based on predictive control of the accumulation signal. The end-to-end control schemes available in the literature are based on reactive control that do not take into account the feedback delay existing between the sender and the receiver nor the forward delay in the flow dynamics.;The performance of the proposed control schemes has been evaluated using the ns-2 simulation environment. The research concludes that active control of hard real-time flows delivers the same or somewhat better QoS as High Bit Rate (HBR, no control), but with a lower average bit rate. Consequently, it helps reduce bandwidth use of controlled real-time flows by anywhere between 31:43% to 43:96%. Proposed reactive control schemes deliver good QoS. However, they do not scale up as well as the predictive control schemes. Proposed predictive control schemes are effective in delivering good quality QoS while using up less bandwidth than even the reactive control schemes. They scale up well as more real-time multimedia flows start employing them.