Integrated traffic modeling and frame skipping for pre-stored streaming videos over cellular networks

With the advance of computing technology, video compression technology, and cellular network infrastructure, rich multimedia applications are dramatically boosted to users. Currently, a deterministic service model has been developed in which a QoS aware network assisted by the deterministic traffic modeling can provide bounded delay and loss free guarantees to video packets. However, the limited memory capacity and access bandwidth of mobile terminals still affect the delivery of pre-stored video contents. Besides, from the cellular network viewpoint, any halfway request for increasing bandwidth may complicate the resource management. Therefore, this paper proposes an Elastically Deterministic Video Traffic Regulator (ED-VTR) to regulate the video traffic, and then generate a series of monotonically decreasing bandwidth demands which effectively simplify the resource management and satisfy the decoder buffer limitation. Moreover, for preventing possible non-sustained playback due to insufficient decoder buffer space, this study proposes an intelligent video frame skip algorithm to determine the most suitable temporal range for skipping frames. Simulation results reveal that ED-VTR effectively reduces the initial bandwidth demand and the requirement of decoder buffer space, while still maintaining advantages of deterministic services. More importantly, ED-VTR maintains the sustained playback with good picture quality and outperforms traditional schemes in the case of insufficient decoder buffer space.