Network-adaptive rate control and unequal loss protection with TCP-friendly protocol for scalable video over Internet

Video communication with Quality of Service (QoS) is an important and challenging task. To have QoS provision at application level in the current best-effort Internet, rate control, congestion control and error control are several effective approaches. In this paper, we propose a new network-adaptive rate control and Unequal Loss Protection (ULP) scheme in conjunction with TCP-friendly congestion control for scalable video streaming. Our proposed approach is capable of simultaneously controlling congestion and packet loss occurred across the Internet. More specifically, we first dynamically estimate the available network bandwidth on the fly. Then, TCP-friendly congestion control is performed to smoothly adjust the sending rate for transmission of continuous media. Considering the characteristic of scalable video, unequal loss protection at packet level is adopted for different video layers while performing congestion control. Consequently, a fixed-length and priority-based packetization scheme is introduced to enhance the capability of loss protection and improve the efficiency of network-bandwidth utilization. Moreover, Rate-Distortion (R-D) based bit allocation is proposed to minimize the expected end-to-end distortion. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.