Scene aware smooth playout control for portable media players over random VBR channels

Wireless Multimedia service faces the difficulty of QoS decrease caused by the cache underflow, due to both the unreliable and time-varying nature of the wireless channel. In order to reduce the probability of the cache outage, a statistical model is established to estimate the underflow time of the cache. Based on the estimation of the underflow time, an adaptive playout algorithm with dual-threshold to adjust the frame rate is presented. This approach adjusts the threshold dynamically according to the channel conditions and the status of the cache, and thus regulates the frame rate timely. Moreover, the algorithm possesses scene-aware characteristics, since it adjusts the playout rate according to the motion intensity of the playout scenes to reduce the underflow probability of the cache and provide better QoS. Simulation results show that as compared to other adaptive media playout algorithms, the proposed algorithm efficiently reduces the probability of the cache underflow, especially in low rate channel and timevarying rate environment, and provides better visual quality.