Proactive content rate selection for enhanced streaming media quality

Streaming media services over wireless networks often exhibit poor quality because of the limitations of the end-to-end feedback they typically rely on. In a recent paper [1], Clearmedia, a novel, signaling-proxy based architecture, was proposed to overcome many of these limitations and was shown to have the potential to realize significant gains in the media quality as perceived by the end-user. In this paper, we propose a proactive content rate selection algorithm that can be used in conjunction with the Clearmedia architecture to further improve streaming media quality. Results included in this paper indicate that the combination of proactive content rate selection and Clearmedia architecture leads to significant improvement across several dimensions of media quality.