Quality Adaptation for Congestion Controlled Video Playback over the Internet

Streaming audio and video applications are becoming increasingly popular on the Internet, and the lack of effective congestion control in such applications is now a cause for significant concern. The problem is one of adapting the compression without requiring video-servers to re-encode the data, and fitting the resulting stream into the rapidly varying available bandwidth. At the same time, rapid fluctuations in quality will be disturbing to the users and should be avoided. In this paper we present a mechanism for using layered video in the context of unicast congestion control. This quality adaptation mechanism adds and drops layers of the video stream to perform long-term coarse-grain adaptation, while using a TCPfriendly congestion control mechanism to react to congestion on very short timescales. The mismatches between the two timescales are absorbed using buffering at the receiver. We present an efficient scheme for the distribution of buffering among the active layers. Our ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1999
• Where: SIGCOMM
• Authors: Reza Rejaie, Mark Handley, Deborah Estrin
• Keywords: Communications, Congestion Control, Congestion Control Mechanism, Effective Congestion Control, SIGCOMM 1999