A control-theoretical approach to adaptive Internet video streaming

To support video streaming over the current Internet, a media server usually needs to perform adaptive streaming in combination with congestion control. While existing streaming schemes are mainly designed for particular congestion algorithms and rate shaping techniques, this paper proposes a general buffer-driven adaptive streaming scheme based on control theory. Our scheme can be applied in combination with different congestion control algorithms and different rate shaping (and source coding) techniques. It is also amenable to analysis and easy to implement. Analytical and simulation results show that the proposed scheme gives satisfactory video quality under various Internet conditions while fully utilizing the available network bandwidth.