IEEE COMMUNICATION LETTERS 1 A Novel Buffer Underflow Avoidance Scheme for Multiple-source High Quality Multimedia Delivery

Abstract—This paper proposes a novel buffer underflow avoid-ance scheme for multiple-source multimedia delivery which enables maintaining high user perceived quality in highly loaded network conditions. Unlike existing solutions which perform delivery adaptation by adjusting the original multimedia quality to varying network conditions, this solution is based on dynamic buffer occupancy estimation for multiple streams to achieve its goal. The proposed scheme and three other approaches are compared in terms of estimated user perceived quality. Simulation results show how this scheme outperforms the other solutions including when the number of simultaneous receivers increases significantly. Index Terms—Multiple-source streaming, buffered multimedia delivery, user perceived quality. I