ETFRC: Enhanced TFRC for Media Traffic over Internet

The evident increase in media traffic over Internet is expected to worsen its congestion state. TCP-friendly rate control protocol TFRC is one of the most promising congestion control techniques developed so far. TFRC has been thoroughly tested in terms of being TCP-friendly, responsive, and fair. Yet, its impact on the visual quality and the peak signal-to- noise ratio PSNR of the media traffic traversing Internet is still questionable. In this paper we aimed to point out the enhancements required for TFRC that enables producing the maximum PSNR value for Internet media traffic. Firstly, we suspected the default value of n that represents the number of loss intervals used in calculating the loss event rate in the TFRC equation. This value is recommended to be set to 8 according to the latest RFC of TFRC. We investigated the effect of modifying the TFRC mechanism on the resulting PSNR of the transmitted video over Internet using TFRC via switching n across the values from 2 to 16. We investigated the effect of such variation over a simulated network environment to study its effect on the resulting PSNR for a number of arbitrary video sequences. Our simulations results showed that running TFRC with n=11 led to reaching the maximum PSNR values among all the examined values of n including it