Using software feedback mechanism for distributed MPEG video player systems

When a distributed MPEG player system is transmitting MPEG videos over an open network, like the Internet, the system usually has no control on the network traffic. Thus, it has to look into the dynamic nature of the traffic and to adjust itself in order to provide the quality of service guaranteed to the video transmission. Transmitting multiple video streams and the different levels of quality of service (QoS) requirements for different clients further complicates the problem within the video server. In this paper, a priority feedback mechanism for a video server is proposed. With our pre-defined priority mapping functions and the feedback signal from each client, the video server will make adjustment in terms of priority to the server processes in order to support each client which possess a QoS requirement of its own. From our experiments, we find that when a video server is serving multiple clients, the use of a priority feedback mechanism can improve the overall video system performance.