A Cost-Effective Rate Control for Streaming Video for Wireless Portable Devices

We present a simple and cost effective rate control scheme for streaming video over a wireless channel by using the information of mobile devices’ buffer level. To prevent buffer fullness and emptiness at receivers, the server should be able to adjust sending rate according to receivers’ buffer status. We propose methods to adjust sending rate based on the buffer level and discrete derivative of the buffer occupancy. To be compatible with existing network protocols, we provide methods to adjust sending rate by changing the inter-packet delay (IPD) at the server side. At every round-trip time, adjustments of sending rate are made in order to achieve responsiveness to sudden changes of buffer availabilities. A series of simulations and the prototype system showed that the proposed methods did not cause buffer overflows and it can maintain smoother rate control and react to bandwidth changes promptly.