A buffer-driven approach to adaptively stream stored video over Internet

Since Internet conditions change rapidly with time, it is very important for a streaming media server to scale the quality of transmission depending on prevailing network conditions. We propose a novel buffer-driven adaptive streaming scheme for stored video. Instead of performing quality adaptation based on bandwidth estimation, this scheme scales quality of transmission based on both receiver buffer occupancy and sender buffer occupancy. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve very smooth playback quality while preventing client buffer underflow or overflow. Besides, unlike existing quality adaptation scheme, our scheme can effectively utilize the available bandwidth without bandwidth estimation.