On design of adaptive Internet streaming applications: an architectural perspective

Internet streaming applications should be congestion controlled and quality adaptive. Although the need for adaptive Internet streaming applications has been recognized, no comprehensive architecture that properly incorporates a congestion control mechanism has been presented. Large scale deployment of non-congestion controlled streaming applications could endanger stability of the Internet. The article presents an end-to-end architecture that is suited for non-interactive Internet streaming applications. The architecture integrates congestion control, quality adaptation and error control in a coherent fashion. It is argued that layered quality adaptation along with retransmission based error control are natural design choices for this class of Internet streaming applications. The author discusses the limitations of the end-to-end architecture and extends the architecture by adding multimedia proxy caches to overcome these limitations for playback streaming applications. Finally, a simple design methodology for Internet streaming applications is derived that allows customization without ignoring the main design requirements.