Chan-Gyun Jeong, Sungyong Lee

The Transactions of the Korea Information Processing Society (1994 ~ 2000), Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 721-732, Feb. 2000
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Abstract

Multimedia communication systems require not only high-performance computer hardwares and high-speed networks, but also a buffer management mechanism to process many data efficiently. Two buffer handling methods, Push and Pull, are commonly used. In the Push method, a server controls the flow of dat to a client, while in the Pull method, a client controls the flow of data from a server. Those buffering schemes can be applied to the data transfer between the packet receiving buffer, which receives media data from a network server, and media playout devices, which play the recived media data. However, the buffer management mechanism in client-sides mainly support either one of the Push or the Pull method. Consequently, they have some limitations to support various media playout devices. Futhermore, even though some of them support both methods, it is difficult to use since they can't provide a unified structure. To resolved these problems, in this paper, we propose an efficient and flexible Push/Pull buffer management mechanism at client-side. The proposed buffer management scheme supports both Push and Pull method to provide various media playout devices and to support buffering function to absorb network jitter. The proposed scheme can support the various media playback devices using a single buffer space which in consequence, saves memory space compared to the case that a client keeps tow types of buffers. Moreover, it facilitates the single buffer as a mechanism for the absorbing network jitter effectively and efficiently. The proposed scheme has been implemented in an existing multimedia communication system, so called ISSA (Integrated Streaming Service Architecture), and it shows a good performance result compared to the conventional buffering methods in multimedia communication environments.

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