Book chapter
Optimal Policies for Playing Buffered Media Streams
NETWORKING 2007. Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks, Wireless Networks, Next Generation Internet, pp 652-663
2007
Featured in Collection : UN Sustainable Development Goals @ Drexel
Abstract
This paper addresses a practical problem in our everyday use of streaming media on the Internet: as a user observes the buffering of a media stream with an uncertain transfer rate, when should that user initiate playback of the stream? The tension is that initiating playback prematurely will increase the likelihood of buffer starvation, while a delay in initiating playback is undesirable because it necessitates waiting. Three policies are studied: the optimal policy (exploiting full knowledge of the transfer process), the optimal static policy (the expected value of the optimal policy), and an online policy assuming only knowledge of the transfer rate observed thus far. Lower and upper bounds are derived on the optimal policy as well as the associated minimum cost; these bounds are expressed in terms of a (random) hitting time of the transfer process. Simulation results for a Markov modulated transfer rate process identify static and online policies as near-optimal depending on the time scale of the transfer rate process and the duration of the stream.
Metrics
Details
- Title
- Optimal Policies for Playing Buffered Media Streams
- Creators
- Steven Weber - Drexel University
- Publication Details
- NETWORKING 2007. Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks, Wireless Networks, Next Generation Internet, pp 652-663
- Series
- Lecture Notes in Computer Science
- Publisher
- Springer Berlin Heidelberg; Berlin, Heidelberg
- Resource Type
- Book chapter
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Electrical and Computer Engineering
- Web of Science ID
- WOS:000246476200056
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-37249071832
- Other Identifier
- 991019170334504721
UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
This publication has contributed to the advancement of the following goals:
InCites Highlights
Data related to this publication, from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool:
- Web of Science research areas
- Computer Science, Theory & Methods
- Telecommunications