Dynamic media buffer control scheme for seamless streaming in wireless local area networks

Multimedia streaming between smart devices has come into general use in Wi-Fi networks, for example, streaming a video content in mobile phone to smart TV. However, drastic and frequent changes of link quality caused by wireless channel characteristics such as multipath fading and Doppler effect leads the network throughput unstable. In order to support seamless play even in unstable wireless link, the buffer control for media playback should be smarter and more robust against radical network variations. To this end, we propose a novel dynamic buffering mechanism for HTTP streaming. This is evaluated by experiments: streaming a multimedia content from a smartphone to a display device when they are connected to the same Wi-Fi Access Point. We show that the proposed mechanism outperforms an existing solution in terms of the number of buffering and the total buffering time. We also verify how fast the proposed method adapts to sudden changes of wireless link condition.