Network-Adaptive QoS Control for Relative Service Differentiation-Aware Video Streaming

Emerging networked multimedia applications in the Internet require special supports from the underlying network such as real-time treatment, guaranteed service, and different levels of network service quality. However, the current Internet having the same-service-for-all paradigm is not suitable for these multimedia communications. In this paper, firstly we introduce a scalable and adaptive quality of service (QoS) mapping framework over the differentiated services (DiffServ, or DS) network. The framework is composed of the functionalities of proactive and reactive QoS mapping controls to provide reliable and consistent end-to-end service guarantee. On this framework, we propose a network-adaptive QoS control to have a feedback of instantaneous network fluctuation. The main idea of our proposal is to employ explicit congestion notification (ECN) mechanism in conjunction with the proactive QoS mapping control at the ingress of a DiffServ domain. It is possible not only that the status of network classes is notified to the end-host applications but also that a reactive QoS adjustment is triggered at the ingress side. Our simulation results illustrate how to enhance the QoS performance of streaming video in the under-provisioned network.