Bruneel H ,' Performance analysis of a video streaming buffer', Networking - Icn 2005, Pt 1 lecture notes in computer science 3420

Abstract. In this contribution, we investigate the performance of the output buffer of a video streaming server. We assume that the server encodes the video stream in a scalable way, i.e. the generated video packets contain a base layer ensuring a minimum of guaranteed quality and a stack of additional enhancement layers progressively improving the quality of video. When the output buffer gets congested, one may choose to drop the transmission of some of the layers in the packets, thus reducing the packet transmission time and expediting the restoration of the buffer size to normal levels. A discrete-time finite capacity queueing model with buffer size dependent transmission times is constructed. Using a probability generating functions approach, we focus on the characteristics of idle and busy periods. We obtain performance measures such as the packet loss probability and the average packet transmission time. The latter measure relates to the quality of the video stream. We conclude with some numerical examples.