QoS-Competitive Video Buffering

Many multimedia applications require transmission of streaming video from a server to a client across an internetwork. In many cases loss may be unavoidable due to congestion or heterogeneous nature of the network. We explore how discard policies can be used in order to maximize the quality of service (QoS) perceived by the client. In our model the QoS of a video stream is measured in terms of a cost function, which takes into account the discarded frames. In this paper we consider online policies for selective frame discard and analyze their performance by means of competitive analysis. In competitive analysis the performance of a given online policy is compared with that of an optimal offline policy. In this work we present competitive policies for a wide range of cost functions, describing the QoS of a video stream.

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