Abstract:

In networked multimedia systems, the probing traffic generated by active measurement of available bandwidth might interfere with the audio-visual communications. To solve the problem, a media stream measurement algorithm (MSM) was proposed. Furthermore, an adaptive probing mechanism (LOMA) was developed. When network is lightly loaded, LOMA employs PathLoad algorithm and suppresses the amount and the burst of probing traffic with initiation optimization and procedure optimization. Once the network is congested, LOMA switches to MSM, which uses video packets to serve the measurement purpose without generating any additional probing traffic. Since LOMA can restrain effectively the probing traffic under different network load conditions, it minimizes its interference to the audio-visual communications while maintaining the measurement accuracy.

Key words: available bandwidth, active measurement, media stream, networked multimedia system