Adaptive playout for real-time media streaming

When media is streamed over best-effort networks, a buffer at the client protects against playout interruptions due to variations in the data arrival rate. While the amount of protection offered grows with the size of the client´s buffer, so does the latency that is introduced. In this paper we show how adaptive media playout (AMP) - the variation of the playout speed of media frames depending on the condition of the channel - allows smaller buffer sizes and correspondingly smaller delays for a given level of protection against buffer underflow. We demonstrate this with the results of Markov chain analyses and with simulations. In addition, we consider AMP as a form of receiver-driven rate scalability, allowing clients access to streams encoded at higher source rates than their connections would ordinarily allow.