<title>Continuous-media communication method for minimizing playback interruptions</title>

Abstract

Video-on-demand service will be carried on the future broadband networks. For this service to gain acceptance, methods of maintaining acceptable quality of service must be implemented. However, this is made difficult by the variation in the delay time caused by other communication traffic on the same network. We propose a continuous-media communication method for minimizing the playback interruptions. In our method, the server predicts the delay time and sends data earlier by an amount equal to the delay time, so that the data is received before it should be played back and the number of playback interruptions is reduced. In this way, our method can guarantee the quality of service using end-to-end communication without reserving the required bandwidth in advance. We evaluated our method by simulation under two conditions In the first simulation, we measured the playback interruption rate when there was background traffic. In the second simulation, we measured the rate when we used the delay times measured in actual networks as the simulated delay time. The results showed that using our method reduced the playback interruption rate by 44 - 82% in the first simulation and by 40 - 100% in the second simulation, compared with using no control.© (1998) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.