Patent ID: 8738795

Claim:
A method comprising: updating, periodically, a virtual congestion level for a transmission stream, the transmission stream comprising at least one video stream and at least one data stream; calculating optimization equations to minimize a total distortion of all video and data by solving: min { r i } ⁢ ⁢ ∑ i ⁢ ⁢ d i ⁡ ( r i ) ⁢ ⁢ and ⁢ ⁢ s . t . ⁢ y l = r i ′ + ∑ id ∈ i ⁢ ⁢ r i ≤ γ ⁢ ⁢ c l wherein d i (r i ) denotes the R-D function of each video stream, c 1 denotes the capacity of the bottleneck link, y 1 denotes the total rate over the link which is comprised of the rates of all video streams r i 's and the rates of all data streams r′ 1 traversing the link, and γ denotes the target utilization chosen to be slightly less than unity; characterizing the video R-D tradeoff curves as: d i ⁡ ( r i ) = d i 0 + θ i r i - r i 0 , where the parameters d 0 i , r 0 i , and θ i may be fitted from empirical R-D points of a pre-encoded video stream i for every group of pictures (GOP) in the video stream; updating the virtual congestion level q 1 periodically as follows: q l ⁡ ( t ) = q l ⁡ ( t - τ ) + κ ⁡ ( y l ⁡ ( t ) c l - γ ) ⁢ τ . wherein y 1 (t) denotes an estimated incoming traffic rate, c 1 denotes link capacity, γ denotes the target utilization ration, τ denotes an update interval, and κ denotes a scaling factor for an update size; calculating a new video transmission rate for the at least one video stream based at least in part on the updated virtual congestion level from the transmission stream and at least one rate-distortion parameter (R-D) associated with at least one video stream R-D tradeoff curves; adjusting a current video transmission rate for the at least one video stream based on the new video transmission rate; calculating the random packet marking probability when the transmission stream is part of a network with Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) support, wherein the calculation comprises linearly mapping the virtual congestion level to the random packet marking probability; and calculating the random packet drop probability when the transmission stream is not part of the network with ECN support, wherein the calculation comprises linearly mapping the virtual congestion level to the random packet drop probability.