Receiver-Buffer-Driven Layered Quality Adaptation for Multimedia Streaming

A novel receiver-buffer-driven layered quality adap- tation mechanism is proposed for multimedia streaming over the Internet. The receiver constantly monitors its buffer occupancy and initiates quality adaptation by sending back the request command to the sender when its buffer occupancy is out of range. The sender then adjusts the quality and the amount of layered multimedia packets to be sent out according to the requests. Simulation results show that by using the proposed mechanism, a steady buffer occupancy and overall quality improvement for the multimedia streams can be achieved. Moreover, an efficient utilization of network resources is ensured by using the spare time in the time window to transmit more higher level enhancement layer packets.