The Minimal Buffering Requirements of Congestion Controlled Interactive Multimedia Applications

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 mini...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: IDMS
• Authors: Kang Li, Charles Krasic, Jonathan Walpole, Molly H. Shor, Calton Pu
• Keywords: Buffering Requirement, Congestion Control, IDMS 2001, Minimal Buffering Requirement, Multimedia