An end-to-end robust approach for scalable video over the Internet

This paper introduces an end-to-end robust approach for scalable video over the Internet. The traditional method only considers congestion control, error control and is unable to achieve end-to-end high-quality video transmission in the error-prone environment like the Internet since it does not consider the packetization behavior, network conditions and the media characteristics simultaneously. This paper presents an end-to-end approach for scalable video over the Internet, combining network adaptive congestion control and unequal error control. Considering requirements of multimedia transmission, this paper introduces multimedia congestion control to estimate available bandwidth and smooth the media sending rate. Specially in the transport layer we propose unequal interleaving packetization method and unequal error protection scheme, which can alleviate the effect of the packet loss well. Further we develop the rate-distortion theory for the scalable video over the Internet. Thereafter the optimal bit allocation is presented to determine the bits budgets for the source part and error control part. Simulation shows our scheme can achieve good performance for scalable video over the Internet. Copyright by Science in China Press 2004.