Link bandwidth detection for multimedia streaming in a distributed server environment

Multimedia streaming is gaining popularity with the explosive development of the Internet. Because of the limited bandwidth, many adaptive methods are proposed in order to stream multimedia content smoothly and efficiently. For all these methods there is a basic problem: how to estimate bandwidth situation between client and server. It is more important in a distributed server environment because the same multimedia content can be streamed to client from multiple servers and how to stream this content is based on the bandwidth situation among the clients and the servers. In this paper, we propose a simple but accurate approach to detect link bandwidths between server and client without imposing too much overhead on the network. Any existing methods of multimedia streaming can benefit from this approach.