Server-Side Playout Delay Management for Video Streaming

We present two new schemes for server-side management of playout delays due to receiver buffering, extending existing techniques such as stream acceleration and adaptive media playout. The first scheme combines stream acceleration with video bit rate adaptation. The second scheme achieves adaptive media playout by server-side frame interpolation combined with bit rate adaptation. The proposed schemes reduce playout delay without decreasing playout robustness. We have performed simulations with wireless IEEE 802.11 channels with varying bandwidth, where the end-to-end delay is dynamically grown from 100 to 500 ms using the proposed schemes. Both our schemes achieve a PSNR performance that is close to that of a scheme with constant end-to-end delay of 500 ms, while retaining the small playout delay of a scheme with constant end-to-end delay of 100 ms. Compared to a scheme with constant end-to-end delay of 100 ms, a PSNR gain up to about 3.4 dB is achieved without increasing the playout delay.