ALCS-PP: Adaptive Latency Control Scheme for Packet Pacing in Self-Clocked Congestion Control

Effective congestion control is crucial for maintaining network stability, especially in dynamic environments. Self-Clocked Rate Adaptation for Multimedia (SCReAM) is a hybrid loss and delay-based algorithm for real-time multimedia transmission. It encounters challenges with static pacing and low latency under fluctuating round-trip time (RTT) and jitter resulting in ineffective bandwidth utilization. To address these issues, we propose ALCS-PP, a novel congestion control scheme featuring dynamic rate adjustment and adaptive packet pacing. The evaluation process is divided into three phases. The first phase involves initial performance evaluation using default parameters to establish a baseline comparison. The next phase explores parameter-specific experiments, where individual parameters such as target latency, jitter thresholds, and rate scaling factors are tuned to assess their impact on performance. The last phase investigates multi-parameter combinations to optimize the overall system configuration under various network conditions. Our proposed scheme effectively reduced network queue delay (NQD) by up to 21.91% and smoothed RTT (sRTT) by 13.44%, ensuring better responsiveness in real-time multimedia transmission. These improvements are achieved through adaptive tuning using dynamic soft clamping and gradual corrections, minimizing performance oscillations. Additionally, the scheme maintains metrics such as network throughput (NThput), congestion window (CWND), and bytes in flight (BiF) close to SCReAM’s baseline values, ensuring stable performance. The experimental evaluation highlights the algorithm’s capability to balance delay reduction and network stability, making it suitable for delay-sensitive applications such as 5G, Internet of Things (IoT), and real-time multimedia streaming.