Improving Wireless Access of Video Over the Internet

Network flow buffering is the use of a simple remote flow-regulating buffer that is dynamically deployed between a Web client and server to improve the performance of HTTP-based access and playback of video. We show that HTTP enhanced with network flow buffering performs well, especially under high packet loss and highly variable bandwidth conditions, when compared with using either straight HTTP or streaming. The benefits of network flow buffering are numerous, and include reducing interruptions to playback, maintaining high video-image quality, and decreasing client buffering requirements. Network flow buffering can be easily implemented using existing Web mechanisms.