An adaptive flow control with the re-transmission policy over the server–proxy–client networking environment

Abstract

The current server–client 2-stage-based multimedia transmission configuration is to be changed to a server–proxy–client 3-stage-based one when the broadband Internet becomes true. The traffic flow control scheme becomes different for the coming 3-stage-based multimedia transmission. In this paper, we propose a 3-stage traffic flow control scheme for transmitting multimedia data over the server–proxy–client transmission architecture. Based on the layered video streaming technique, the proposed traffic flow control scheme adjusts the presentation quality according to the currently available bandwidth, i.e., dropping/adding some video layers when the networking situation gets congested/smooth. Additionally, the proposed traffic flow control scheme provides layered video stream buffering control to smoothen video playout and adopts a re-transmission technique to reduce the loss possibility of some important video frames. With the proposed traffic flow control scheme, the coming 3-stage multimedia presentation systems can have a better optimization of bandwidth utilization and presentation quality over a broadband Internet environment.