Wireless congestion control based on delivery of erroneous packets

Traditional mechanisms for congestion control in multimedia streaming systems reduce the data transmission rate when congestion is detected. Unfortunately, decreasing the rate of the media stream also decreases the media quality, but it is the only way to combat congestion when it is caused by overwhelming traffic that exceeds the capacity of the network. However, if the bottleneck is a wireless link, congestion is often derived from retransmissions caused by bit errors in the radio link. If this is the case, it might be beneficial not to reduce the transmission rate, but allow delivery of packets containing bit errors up to the application layer first. In this scenario, the quality of media will be impacted by bit errors instead of lower coding rate. In this paper, we propose a system concept allowing bit errors in packets in order to relieve congestion. We have built a simulation to compare the performance of the proposed system against traditional congestion control. The results show that the proposed approach can improve the overall performance both by increasing the throughput over the wireless and improving the perceived video quality in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR).