This paper uses analysis and experiments to study the minimal buffering requirements of congestion controlled multimedia applications. Applications in the Internet must use congestion control protocols, which vary transmission rates according to network conditions. To produce a smooth perceptual quality, multimedia applications use buffering and rate adaptations to compensate these rate oscillations. While several adaptation policies are available, they require different amounts of buffering at end-hosts. We study the relationship between buffering requirements and adaptation policies. In particular, we focus on a widely pursued policy that adapts an application's sending rate exactly to the average available bandwidth to maximize throughput. Under this adaptation policy, at least a minimal amount of buffering is required to smooth the rate oscillation inherent in congestion control, and we view this minimal buffering requirement as a cost of maximizing throughput. We derive the minimal buffering requirement for this policy assuming that applications use an additive-increase-and-multiplicative-decrease (AIMD) algorithm for congestion control. The result shows the relationship between parameters of AIMD algorithms and the delay cost. We show that the buffering requirement is proportional to the parameters of the AIMD algorithm and quadratic to the application's sending rate and round-trip-time. We verify this relationship through experiments. Our results indicate that adaptation policies that maximize throughput are not suitable for interactive applications with high bit rates or long round-trip-times.
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