An Integrated Push/Pull Buffer Management Method in Multimedia Communication Environments

Abstract

Multimedia communication systems require not only high-performance computer hardware and high- speed networks, but also a buffer management mechanism to process voluminous data efficiently. Two buffer handling methods, push and pull, are commonly used. In the push method, a server controls the flow of data to a client, while in the pull method, a client controls the flow of data from a server. These two buffering schemes can be applied to the data transfer between the packet receiving buffer, which receives media data from a network server, and media playback devices, which play the received media data. However, the buffer management mechanisms at client-side mainly support only one of the push and the pull methods. In other words, different types of playback devices separately use either out not both of the buffer methods. This leads to inefficient buffer memory usage and to inflexible buffer management for the various types of media playback devices. To resolve these problems, in this paper we propose an integrated push/pull buffer mechanism able to manage both push and pull schemes in a single buffer at client-side. The proposed scheme can support various media playback devices using a single buffer space, which in consequence saves memory space compared to the case where a client keeps two types of buffers. Moreover, it facilitates the single buffer as a mechanism for absorbing network jitter effectively and efficiently. The proposed scheme has been implemented in an existing multimedia communication system called ISSA developed by the authors, and has showed good performance compared to the conventional buffering methods in multimedia communication environments.

This work was partly supported by Grant IJRP-9803-6 from the Ministry of Information and Communication of the Republic of Korea