Practical design of a proxy agent to facilitate adaptive video streaming service across wired/wireless networks

0164-1212/$ see front matter 2009 Elsevier Inc. A doi:10.1016/j.jss.2009.06.026 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +886 2 27376386; fax E-mail addresses: [email protected] (J.-S. edu.tw (C.-W. Tsai). Thanks to the growing of the wireless networks, the video streaming application becomes a ubiquitous joyful service. In a wireless communication network environment, the service traffic spans across the wired and wireless domains. In this article, we propose a practical design of a proxy agent – SPONGE (Stream Pooler Over a Network Graded Environment) sitting between the wireless User Equipments (UEs) and the video streaming server to facilitate the adaptive video streaming service across wired/wireless networks. To make the wireless streaming service more efficient, an input video session would be encoded as multiple qualities of video streams so that UEs with a similar receiving condition can share streams with the same service quality via SPONGE. SPONGE can alleviate the direct load on the original stream broadcasting server. Meanwhile, it can make each UE get an adaptive streaming service according to the network conditions of the UE by a reduced network condition feedback latency. Our theoretical analysis and simulation results show that SPONGE can help wireless streaming users get a smooth and better playback quality by a quick and accurate reaction to the network condition. 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.