Network adapted selective frame-dropping algorithm for streaming media

This paper presents a network adapted selective frame-dropping algorithm for streaming media over the Internet, which aims to address the problem of random packet losses resulted from network bandwidth mismatching. The basic idea is to first determine a sending window for each GOP according to its rendering time interval, and then selectively drop some frames with low priority to ensure that other more important frames in this GOP can be reliably delivered to the receiver within the time limitation of the GOP's sending window. For each GOP, the frame-dropping policies are determined in advance according to the transmitting results of its preceding GOP, and then slightly re-adjusted after each frame has been sent according to the current available network bandwidth. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve free-error and fluent rendering effects even in the case of worse network conditions.