MACC: Media Aware Congestion Control

Ladan Gharai

Recently the use of media rich networked applications, such as video conferencing, telepresence, distance learning and voice-over-IP has greatly increased. While these tools enhance our ability to collaborate and communicate, their increased use poses a potential threat to the stability of the Internet, as they typically utilize non-congestion controlled transport protocols in a tradeoff for timely delivery.

MACC is investigating the use of congestion control mechanisms, in particular, the TCP-Friendly Rate Control protocol (TFRC), as standardized in RFC 3448, for interactive networked multimedia applications. Our focus is on developing tools and standards to better understand the interactions between TFRC, interactive media applications and media codecs is real world scenarios.

Software and Downloads

This code is basically the latest version of Iperf with an added option of invoking congestion control for UDP flows (with -z, -uz or -zu). Here are examples of TCP and TFRC flows generated with Iperf (+libtfrc) between two hosts at ISI-east and ISI-west: examples.

Publications and Standards Contributions

• Colin Perkins and Ladan Gharai, RTP and the Datagram Congestion Control Protocol, to appear in IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME), Toronto, Canada, July 2006.
• Colin Perkins and Ladan Gharai, Holographic and 3D Teleconferencing and Visualization: Implications for Terabit Networked Applications, to appear in INFOCOM 2006 High-Speed Networking Workshop: The Terabits Challenge Barcelona, Spain, April 2006.
• Ladan Gharai, RTP Profile for TCP Friendly Rate Control, draft-ietf-avt-tfrc-profile-05.txt, work in progress, October 2005.
• Ladan Gharai, Colin Perkins and Tom Lehman, Packet Reordering, High Speed Networks and Transport Protocol Performance, To appear in the proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN'04), Chicago, IL, October 2004.
• Ladan Gharai and Colin Perkins, Real-time Collaborative Environments and the Grid, To appear in the proceedings of the Workshop on Advanced Collaborative Environments (WACE'04), Nice, France, September 2004.
• Ladan Gharai and Colin Perkins, Implementing Congestion Control in the Real World, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo, Lausanne, Switzerland, August 2002.

Talks

• The Real-Time Transport Protocol Framework, HDTV and Standards Developement at 21st APAN Meeting, Tokyo, Japan, January 2006.

• Congestion Control and Networked Media Application at University of Glasgow 2005 Research Festival, Computing Science, September 2005.

• Uncompressed HD Video Streaming with Congestion Control at 18th APAN Meeting, July 2004.

  Acknowledgments

  This work is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant No. 0334182. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or the U. S. Government.

  Copyright © 2002-2003 USC Information Sciences Institute