Integrated end-to-end buffer management and congestion control for scalable video communications

In this paper we present a video communication system that integrates end-to-end buffer management and congestion control at the source with the playout adjustment mechanism at the receiver. While each component of the system has been considered independently in the literature, our focus in this work is their integration. The proposed system exploits the fact that when congestion control is implemented at the source, most of the loss occurs at the source and not within the network. Based on this observation, we design the buffer management to trade off random loss for controlled loss of visually less important data. Frame rate is adjusted at the receiver to maximize the visual quality of the displayed video based on the overall loss. We tested our system with both H.26L and a subband/wavelet video coder, and found that it significantly improves the received video quality in both cases.