Network-adaptive rate control with unequal loss protection for scalable video over Internet

Video communication with quality of service (QoS) is an important and challenging task. To have QoS provision or guarantee at the application level in the current best-effort Internet, congestion control and error control are two effective approaches. In this paper, we propose a new network-adaptive rate control scheme for scalable video communication in conjunction with Unequal Loss Protection (ULP). The proposed scheme not only adapts the bit rate to the dynamical network condition, but also has the error-resilient capability. In other words, our proposed approach is capable of simultaneously controlling congestion and error occurred across the Internet. More specifically, first, we dynamically estimate the available network bandwidth on the fly. Secondly, congestion control is performed to smoothly adjust the sending rate for continuous media. Thirdly, network packet loss rate is taken into account while performing rate adaptation at the bitstream level by minimizing end-to-end distortion. Lastly, error protection at packet level is added using ULP while performing rate control. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.