Prefetching Based Adaptive Media Playout for Seamless Media Streaming

Abstract

Recently, with the advance of computing and networking technique, the high speed internet becomes widespread, however, it is still hard job to do streaming the media which requires high network bandwidth over the internet. Previous researches for streaming over the internet mainly proposed techniques that controls the QoS(Quality of Service) of the media in proportion to the network status. Though, this could be the solution for the service provider while the service user who wants constant QoS may not satisfy with variable QoS. In the paper, we propose a network adaptive prefetching technique, PAP, for guarantee of constant QoS. The PAP prefetches frames by increasing the frame transmission rate while the available network bandwidth is high. The PAP uses the prefetched frames to guarantee the QoS while the available network bandwidth is low and increases the playout interval to prevent buffer underflow. The experiment result shows that the proposed PAP could guarantee the constant QoS by prefetching the frames adaptively to the network bandwidth with the characteristic of video stream.