Dynamic Rate Control for Media Streaming in High-Speed Mobile Networks

Abstract

Emerging high-speed mobile networks enable us to receive media streaming data by mobile terminals on demand. However, media streaming with fixed bitrate causes some problems such as annoying artificial noise, interruption, and so forth, since link quality fluctuates dramatically in such mobile networks. Motivated by this, in this paper, we propose a novel media streaming system with dynamic rate control scheme to achieve continuous streaming on such unstable networks. The proposed rate control scheme uses the delay of the transcoding process to estimate network bandwidth, and adjusts the bitrate of media streams dynamically. To demonstrate our system and scheme, the proposed streaming system is evaluated under some typical models of bandwidth change in high-speed mobile networks. The results show that stable and high-quality streaming without interruption can be achieved by the proposed scheme. Moreover, we successfully demonstrate that our system performs continuous streaming on real mobile networks even in the severe network condition such as on a moving train.