The congestion problem has driven many researchers to address it, among other networking issues. In a packet-switched network, congestion is essential; it leads to a high response time to deliver packets due to heavy traffic, which eventually causes packet loss. Hence, congestion control mechanisms are utilized to prevent such cases. Several interesting algorithms are proposed to focus on this dilemma, such as the Self-Clocked Rate Adaptation for Multimedia (SCReAM) designed for interactive real-time video streaming applications. One of the main issues of SCReAM is the high design complexity due to the large size of its documentation and coding. Furthermore, there is a considerable number of parameters that can be adjusted to accomplish the desired performance. This study proposes a guided parameters’ tuning approach to assess and optimize the SCReAM algorithm in an emulated 5G environment through a detailed exploration of its parameters. The proposed approach consists of three phases, namely, the initialization phase, the standalone experimentation phase, and the hybrid experimentation phase. In the first phase, we illustrate the method of initializing and implementing the environment, followed by specifying the investigated parameters’ settings, testing, and validation. The second phase aims to investigate SCReAM parameters in isolation to identify the effect on the performance in relation to network queue delay, smoothed Round Trip Time (sRTT), and throughput. The final phase discusses the possibility of achieving the optimum performance by combining various sets to provide researchers with clear and explicit guidelines to establish an adequate SCReAM behavior for the desired application. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that proposes a preliminary and comprehensive analysis of the SCReAM algorithm. Based on the proposed approach, when L4S/ECN is disabled, we reduced the network queue delay by 63.36% and increased the network throughput by 48.6% as compared to the results generated by the original design. In L4S/ECN-enabled mode, the network queue delay is reduced by 16.17% while the network throughput increased by 93%.

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.

Congestion Control (CC) is essential in networked systems, especially in environments with strict delay and throughput requirements. While CC algorithms like Self-Clocked Rate Adaptation for Multimedia (SCReAM) and Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip propagation time (BBR) have shown progress, each faces limitations: BBR encounters difficulty in balancing responsiveness and fairness when rapid fluctuations in network conditions arise, which can lead to inefficient performance in shared environments. On the other hand, although SCReAM is designed for multimedia traffic, it struggles to dynamically adapt the congestion window to unpredictable or highly congested networks, leading to inefficient resource utilization. This paper proposes SACWOM, a hybrid congestion window optimization mechanism that combines our novel method with SCReAM’s rate control and BBR’s bandwidth-delay estimation to enhance throughput stability, fairness, and adaptability by dynamically adjusting the congestion window. Extensive simulations demonstrate SACWOM’s significant improvements over SCReAM in managing congestion window and bytes in flight under diverse network conditions. In Phase I, SACWOM achieved up to 11.96-13.27% increase in congestion window and bytes in flight by maintaining higher data flow. Phase II analysis shows up to 20.76-22.64% improvements with optimized configurations. Finally, Phase III, comprising 100 experiments, reveals SACWOM’s dynamic adaptability, achieving up to 50-70% improvements. These results highlight SACWOM as a robust mechanism suitable for various applications across diverse network scenarios.