Dynamic frame dropping for bandwidth control in MPEG streaming system

In a network environment where the available bandwidth changes dynamically, it is desirable for a streaming system to control the media quality in an adaptive way according to the dynamics of underlying network resource. This paper presents the implementation of a real-time MPEG filtering system which uses the concept of dynamic frame-drop. The filtering system drops video frames in a controlled way and reconstructs a valid MPEG system stream in real-time. The system consists of a sequence of filtering modules and each module is carefully designed to maintain the synchronization characteristics of real-time streaming. A special effort is given to the correct implementation of video and audio synchronization after frame-drop. The experiments show that the implemented system produces a valid MPEG system stream after filtering as well as the media bandwidth of a filtered stream is dynamically controlled by a given frame-drop policy.