TMRC: A load-adaptive TCP-friendly rate control protocol for real-time multimedia environment

In this paper, we introduce and analyze a new congestion control approach for multimedia streaming, called TMRC (Time-based Model TCP-Friendly Rate Control). TMRC is a time-based end-to-end congestion control mechanism, which uses a model to estimate sending rate and assures the fairness against competing flows. With our mechanism, the sender can explicitly adjust its sending rate as a function of the measured rate reported by the correspond receiver. In long term, TMRC acts as a TCP-friendly flow with the same throughput as other flows while in short term it performs more stable in its sending rate. This makes our mechanism suitable for real-time multimedia streaming. At last, we compare TMRC to other TCP-friendly rate control mechanism, such as TFRC.