Arrival process-controlled adaptive media playout for video streaming

Abstract

To enhance the video quality of multimedia streaming services, an Adaptive Media Playout (AMP) mechanism is designed in this study. The proposed AMP mechanism sets two threshold values, denoted as L and H, for the playout controller to dynamically adjust the playout rate according to the number of buffered packets. When the number of buffered packets is below L or over H, the playout rate will slow down or speed up quadratically. While the number of buffered packets is between L and H, the playback speed is determined based on the instant packet arrival rate, which is estimated by the proposed Arrival Process Tracking Algorithm (APTA). We employ computer simulations to demonstrate the performance of our proposed AMP scheme, and compare it with conventional AMP mechanisms. Numerical results show that our AMP design can reduce both buffer underflow and buffer overflow probabilities, and is superior to conventional AMP approaches. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.