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The emergence of streaming multimedia players provides users with low latency audio and video content o ver the Internet. Providing high-quality, best e ort, real-time multimedia content requires adaptive delivery schemes that fairly share the available network bandwidth with reliable data protocols. Real-time multimedia tra c must avoid halting TCP-based HTTP tra c! This paper proposes a new ow and congestion control scheme, SCP (Streaming Control Protocol), for realtime streaming of continuous multimedia data across the Internet. The design of SCP arose from our long-time experience in building and using an adaptive real-time streaming video player. SCP addresses two issues associated with real-time streaming. First, it uses a congestion control policy that allows it to fairly share network bandwidth with both TCP and other SCP streams. Second, it improves smoothness in streaming and ensures low, predictable latency. This distinguishes it from TCP's jittery steady-state congestion avoidance policy that is based on linear growth and one-half rate reduction. In this paper,we present a description and analysis of SCP, and an evaluation using actual Internet-based experiments.

This paper describes the design and implementation of a real-time, streaming, Internet video and audio player. The player has a number of advanced features including dynamic adaptation to changes in available bandwidth, latency and latency variation; a multi-dimensional media scaling capability driven by user-specified quality of service (QoS) requirements; and support for complex content comprising multiple synchronized video and audio streams. The player was developed as part of the QUASAR t project at Oregon Graduate Institute, is freely available, and serves as a testbed for research in adaptive resource management and QoS control.

The emergence of free streaming media players, coupled with the availability o f p o werful inexpensive laptop computers has created a domain for mobile multimedia applications. Mobile multimedia applications must deal with the inherent v ariability generated when migrating from o ce to conference room, den to patio, or classroom to dorm room. This paper presents a multi-layered multimedia architecture utilizing adaptive l a yers and cross-layer noti cations. An implementation of that architecture is demonstrated using a streaming media player that communicates with a video server while switching from wired LAN to POTS to wireless LAN, transparently adapting to new network addresses and bandwidth uctuations. Mobility is supported by using device indications to force the adaptive f e e d b a c k system into an \exploratory" mode and signal the application to re-establish the control and data channels.

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