Adaptive media playout buffer management for latency optimization of mobile live streaming

Abstract

Media playout buffer is widely employed by today's streaming media player to cope with short-term network variation and achieve continuous playout. However, the playout buffer inevitably introduces additional latency, affecting mobile live streaming experience. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive playout buffer management approach to dynamically optimize the buffer latency while to a great extent keeping playout continuity. We collect historical buffer level variation information, on the basis of which we estimate the buffer level variation range with a probabilistic model which can be implemented to a dynamic programming algorithm. According to this estimated range, we use adaptive media playout (AMP) scheme to adjust the buffer level on the fly. Experimental results show good tradeoff dynamically made by our proposed approach between buffer latency and playout interruption.