Media streaming applications have a unique characteristic that is different from data applications. They have an intrinsic bandwidth requirement that is constrained by the streaming source. Namely, the transmission rate cannot exceed the encoding rate. This characteristic indicates that media streaming is less likely to cause self-induced congestion. This is
because media streaming does not attempt to acquire the maximum available bandwidth. Note that we are looking in the standpoint of which a media streaming flow shares its traffic with the bursty Internet traffic. In another standpoint in which all the flows are media streaming, congestion and excessive packet loss is inevitable.