Patent ID: 8296813

Claim:
A method for optimizing quality of streaming data transmitted between a first node and a second node over a network, wherein the first node includes a transmitter and one or more software modules embodied in a computer readable medium, wherein the one or more software modules include a Quality of Service (QoS) module, the streaming data including one or more frame groups, each frame group containing a plurality of frames including an intra frame (I-frame) and one or more predictive frames (P-frames) that reference the I-frame, the method comprising: sequentially transmitting a transmission queue containing one or more frames from a frame group from the first node to the second node using the transmitter; with the QoS module, when a new I-frame is queued for transmission dropping from the transmission queue any frames in the transmission queue that have not already been transmitted, except for a currently transmitting I-frame; with the QoS module, determining a number P of P-frames that were dropped from the transmission queue; for a subsequent frame group, predictively determining with the QoS module a number between 0 and P of P-frames to drop from a transmission queue for the subsequent frame group based on how many P-frames were dropped from the transmission queue for a frame group preceding the subsequent frame group; and dropping with the QoS module the predictively determined number of P-frames from the transmission queue for the subsequent frame group.