A max-min fairness congestion control for layered streaming of scalable video

In a best-effort networking environment, efficient and fair congestion control is highly desired for every traffic flow to share the bandwidth appropriately. This paper proposes a congestion control algorithm for user datagram protocol rate-based layered streaming of scalable video, e.g., 3-D wavelet based scalable video streaming, which provides a variety of video bit rates. This proposed congestion control mechanism, as an extension of explicit control protocol that is a newly proposed congestion control protocol believed to be superior to transport control protocol, accommodates both window-based and rate-based flows to the heterogeneous network environment which can include wired and wireless channels. This paper further introduces the notion of reserved packet length so that the traffic of layered video can better share the bandwidth of a network by taking account of the max-min fairness with other traffic.