Adaptive Video Streaming: Rate and Buffer on the Track of Minimum Rebuffering

New trends of the future Internet aim to overcome the best effort service and offer guaranteed service to the users. Guarantees should be acquired not only at the network level but also at higher layers in order to deliver the best quality of experience. This paper presents a new approach for HTTP-compliant adaptive applications. This solution fulfills the guarantees of maximum rebuffering probability even in highly variable environments as the future Internet seems to be. Guaranteed low rebuffering improves visibly the user's quality of experience during multimedia events. The tests performed confirmed that, unlike rate-based adaptation algorithms, our solution ensures maximum rebuffering and it decisively reduces rate switches in comparison with buffer-based adaptation algorithms.