This paper studies the end-to-end flow control strategy of delivering videos over a data path, where on one end, a server retrieves large fixed-sized video blocks from its disk drive at a constant block rate. on the other end, a client consumes variable-sized compressed video frames at a fixed frame rate. Between the two ends, a network channel transmits small fixed-sized cells at a constant cell rate. We propose a flow control plan with two hierarchical phases, namely, the peer-level and network-level phases. Our control plans consume both the minimum buffer space and the minimum network channel bandwidth. We conduct a set of experiments by tracing several typical video tracks, and observe a few common facts that for each video flow, (1) the client only need to enforce couple of seconds start-up delay before playback (2) the minimum total buffer space required is less than 1.4 Mbytes and (3) the minimum network bandwidth required is very close to the video's average bit rate.
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