An Efficient Packet Discarding Scheme for On-demand Video Streaming

Streaming services over the Internet are expected to grow rapidly in the near future. However, bursty packet losses caused by buffer overflow at routers are a serious problem in these services, and are responsible for degradation of the Quality of Service (QoS). Active Queue Management (AQM) that discards the packets at routers is effective for avoiding the buffer overflow but results in the degradation of QoS as well unless it takes into account the characteristic of the streaming media. Generally, the streaming media implement forward error correction (FEC) that is a promising technique to recover the lost packets during transmission at receiver ends. In this paper, a packet discarding scheme considering the FEC recovery ability and the video encoding method at routers is proposed. This packet discarding scheme is provided by combining the assigning priority to the media packets at the sender end and the simple packet discarding scheme at the routers. Thus, these proposed methods reduce the packet loss ratios and improve the QoS of streaming media. The results of computer simulations show that the packet loss ratio of the proposed method is highly improved compared to the conventional method even for highly congested networks.