Anti-run-dry algorithm for optimal control of playoutbuffers

  • Authors:
  • Brita H. Hafskjold

  • Affiliations:
  • Norwegian Defence Research Establishment

  • Venue:
  • ISICT '03 Proceedings of the 1st international symposium on Information and communication technologies
  • Year:
  • 2003

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Receiver playoutbuffers are required to smooth network delay variations for multimedia streams. The two most commonly used playoutbuffer algorithms are called Fixed Playout Delay, where all packets have the same end-to-end delay and Adaptive Playout Delay, which uses between-talk-spurt-adjustment, where a new value of end-to-end delay is calculated for each new talkspurt. For long talkspurts and for streaming of multimedia, within-talk-spurt-adjustment, where the playout speed is controlled, can give a lower mean end-to-end delay and fewer packets that are lost due to late arrivals. By the use of optimal control theory, a statistically optimal control of the playout speed can be calculated. Like other buffer control algorithms, the optimal control solution has no guarantee that the buffer will not run dry. This paper introduces an anti-run-dry algorithm that gives a controllable run dry probability. We demonstrate the performance of the anti-run-dry algorithm together with the optimal control algorithm by using a simulated network and a real Internet packet trace. This is compared to the performance of Adaptive Playout Delay and of one of the existing within-talkspurt-adjustment algorithms.