As the current Internet becomes popular in information access, demands for real-time display and playback of continuous media are ever increasing. The applications include real-time audio/video clips embedded in WWW, electronic commerce, and video-on-demand. In this paper, we present a new control protocol R3CP for real-time applications that transmit stored MPEG video stream over a lossy and best-effort based network environment like the Internet. Several control mechanisms are used: a) packet framing based on the meta data; b) adaptive queue-length based rate control scheme; c) data preloading; and d) look-ahead pre-retransmission for lost packet recovery. Different from many adaptive rate control schemes proposed in the past, the proposed flow control is to ensure continuous, periodic playback of video frames by keeping the receiver buffer queue length at a target value to minimize the probability that player finds an empty buffer. Contrary to the widespread belief that "Retransmission of lost packets is unnecessary for real-time applications," we show the effective use of combining look-ahead pre-retransmission control with proper data preloading and adaptive rate control scheme to improve the real-time playback performance. The performance of the proposed protocol is studied via simulation using actual video traces and actual delay traces collected from the Internet. The simulation results show that R3CP can significantly improve frame playback performance especially for transmission paths with poor packet delivery condition.

Currently, the issues in Quality of Service, fairness and pricing strategies should have expedited the emergence of service differentiation in wireless access networks. In this paper, we propose a novel scheduling algorithm, called the Wireless Differentiated Fair Queueing (WDFQ) algorithm, to accommodate such need by providing delay/jitter controls, and fair residual bandwidth sharing for real-time and non-real-time traffic streams simultaneously. We show that the WDFQ scheme can achieve excellent performance, including timely delivery of real-time traffic, virtually error-free transmission of non-real-time traffic, and fair usage of channel bandwidth among remote stations. In addition, the location-dependent channel error property, as appeared in most wireless networks, are considered in the model and the temporary short error bursts are compensated by credits of bandwidth. The simulation results suggest that the length of retransmission period should be adapted to the error length to achieve good performance and maintain low implementation complexity.