By Madhusudhan S Kanishka V

Multimedia flows require a minimum and continuous bandwidth guarantee. Available bandwidth keeps varying, which might result in unstable multimedia streaming. Streaming a higher bit rate multimedia when the available bandwidth is less than the bit rate results in higher buffering time and if the stream bit rate is less than available bandwidth it results in wastage of the bandwidth. So it is better if the bit rate adapts to the changes in the available bandwidth.

An effective technique to identify the condition of the network by measuring end-to-end available bandwidth. Feedback to the server about the available bandwidth of the receiver. Server should maintain multimedia encoded at various bit rates. Server should start streaming multimedia of appropriate frame rate based on the feedback.

RTP and RTSP do not adopt themselves changing network conditions, which results in unnecessary buffering even if the user doesnt require the stream in higher quality. HTTP Sites like youtube.com allow users to select stream of their choice, but users will not be aware of the network conditions, thus it might result higher buffering times or wastage of bandwidth.

Microsoft smooth streaming Silverlight based streaming system which adapts to changing network conditions. MPEG-DASH- is the only adaptive bit-rate HTTP-based streaming solution. Adobe Dynamic Streaming for Flash This system provides users to switch among various video qualities dynamics. But its not done automatically.

Evaluation of end-to-end available bandwidth using SLoPS. SLoPS - Self-Loading Periodic Streams. Using multimedia packets itself to measure the bandwidth. Sending feedback to the server to adjust the bitrate and switch over to the appropriately encoded video. This process of streaming is called Adaptive Bitrate Streaming.

1) Selective rate control for multimedia streaming application on wireless networks - Panagiotis Papadimitriou and Vassilis Tsaoussidis. 2) An Experimental Evaluation of Rate-Adaption Algorithms in Adaptive Streaming in HTTP by Saamer Akhshabi, Ali C. Begen and Constantine Dovrolis. 3) Bandwidth estimation: metrics, measurement techniques, and tools by R. S. Prasad, M. Murray, C. Dovrolis and K. Claffy.