A Scheduling Strategy to Avoid Playout Interruptions in Video Streaming Systems

In Internet multimedia streaming, a raw quality base layer is adaptively enriched with one or more enhancement layers to fully use the available bandwidth. In this work, using a control theoretic approach, we design and implement an innovative scheduling strategy for properly distributing the network available bandwidth among base and enhancement layers, in order to avoid playout interruptions due to base layer underflows at the decoder side. The proposed solution has been casted in a H.264/AVC SVC video streaming architecture. Experimental results, collected using a single bottleneck testbed and three different benchmarking video sequences, have demonstrated that the proposed scheduling strategy is able to avoid or strongly limit the number of playout interruptions under moderate or high traffic conditions, respectively.