Content-aware congestion control over MPLS networks for multimedia transmission

Multimedia distribution over the Internet has emerged as a popular application. However, delivering multimedia content poses many non-trivial challenges such as fulfilling Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. This thesis focuses on how to improve QoS of multimedia traffic over Enterprise Data Networks (EDNs) using MultiProtocol Label Switching (MPLS). The reason for choosing MPLS is its support for traffic engineering (TE) and QoS provisioning. A novel content-aware congestion control algorithm is designed, implemented and tested. The proposed scheme enables the MPLS router to discard packets with less important content when there is congestion in the network. By employing such content-aware congestion control, the overall quality of multimedia content is not significantly affected, enabling graceful degradation of quality using a Wavelet based compression technique. The proposed scheme is modeled and simulated using the J-Sim network simulator and implemented in an extended public domain Linux-based MPLS router. Simulation and measurement based testing shows that the proposed scheme maintains low delay, low jitter, and packet loss of multimedia traffic, even under high network congestion when compared with standard MPLS and IP QoS architecture---DiffServ. This thesis contributes a novel scheme to the existing MPLS architecture to improve QoS of Wavelet based compressed multimedia data.