Integration of Congestion Control and Adaptive Playout for Unicast Media Streaming

摘要

To ease multimedia streaming over the QoS-deficient Internet, the network-adaptive streaming has been introduced recently. For an unicast media streaming environment, TCP-friendly end-to-end congestion control is widely suggested to handle the network congestion. However, the congestion control usually gives abrupt changes in the available bandwidth between streaming systems and the performance of media streaming can be degraded. To help this situation, we can adaptively control the playback speed of audio and video by adopting the time-scale modification technique. It can mitigate the effect of network variations in delay and loss, especially focusing on the low-latency video streaming situation. In this paper, we attempt to improve the streaming quality, when the congestion control is applied, by taking advantage of the adaptive playout mechanism. It can pro-actively prepare for imminent change with the adaptive playout capability, by estimating the expected buffer level and adjusting change in transmission rate, and controlling the playback rate.