Adaptive playback buffer for wireless streaming media

The wireless streaming media communications are fragile to the delay jitter because the conditions and requirements vary frequently with the users´ mobility. Buffering is a typical way to reduce the delay jitter of media packets before the playback, however, it will incur a longer end-to-end delay. Our motivation in this paper is to balance the elimination of delay jitter and the decrease of end-to-end delay. We propose a novel adaptive playback buffer (APB) based on the probing scheme. By utilizing the probing scheme, instantaneous network situations are collected and then using with the delay margin and the delay jitter margin, the playback buffer is adaptively adjusted to represent the continuous and real-time streaming media at the receiver. Unlike the previous studies, the novelty and contributions of the paper are: a) accuracy: by employing the instantaneous network information, the adjustment to the playback buffer correctly reflects the current network situations, which makes the adjustment effective; b) efficiency: by utilizing the simple probing scheme, APB achieves the current network situations without the complex mathematic prediction and makes it efficient to adjust the playback buffer. Performance data obtained through extensive simulations show that our APB is effective to reduce the delay jitter and to decrease the buffer delay.