Recently, HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) based adaptive streaming (HAS) has been proposed as a solution for efficient use of network resources. HAS performs rate adaptation that adjusts the video quality according to the network conditions. The conventional approaches for rate adaptation involve accurately estimating the available bandwidth or exploiting the playback buffer in HAS clients rather than estimating the network bandwidth. In this paper, we present a playback buffer model for rate adaptation and propose a new buffer-based rate adaptation scheme. First, we model the playback buffer as a queueing system that stores video segments. The proposed scheme selects the next video bitrate that minimizes the difference between the current buffer occupancy and the expected value from the playback buffer model. The evaluation results indicated that the proposed scheme achieves higher video quality than conventional algorithms and can cope with various environments without the tuning of the configuration parameters.