High-coverage Internet radio

We propose a novel buffering scheme for Internet radio in a mobile environment. Compared to standard Internet radio schemes, the proposed system significantly mitigates audio outages while providing instant channel switching. The core idea is to deploy both a remote buffer on a dedicated server and a local buffer at the client such that the client has random access to the data in the remote buffer. Additionally, two extensions of the basic algorithm are presented: audio recoding reduces the data rate of the content and a handover algorithm mitigates the load of the dedicated server. This work takes into account experimental results from driving tests and extensive simulations. It is shown that the proposed approach outperforms standard Internet radio under given quality-of-service constraints.