Error and Congestion Resilient Video Streaming over Broadband Wireless

• Main Authors: Laith Al-Jobouri, Ismail A. Ali, Martin Fleury, Mohammed Ghanbari
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2015-04-01
• Series: Computers
• Subjects: broadband wireless; access network congestion; data partitioning; multimedia networking; packet scheduling
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/2073-431X/4/2/113

In this paper, error resilience is achieved by adaptive, application-layer rateless channel coding, which is used to protect H.264/Advanced Video Coding (AVC) codec data-partitioned videos. A packetization strategy is an effective tool to control error rates and, in the paper, source-coded data partitioning serves to allocate smaller packets to more important compressed video data. The scheme for doing this is applied to real-time streaming across a broadband wireless link. The advantages of rateless code rate adaptivity are then demonstrated in the paper. Because the data partitions of a video slice are each assigned to different network packets, in congestion-prone wireless networks the increased number of packets per slice and their size disparity may increase the packet loss rate from buffer overflows. As a form of congestion resilience, this paper recommends packet-size dependent scheduling as a relatively simple way of alleviating the buffer-overflow problem arising from data-partitioned packets. The paper also contributes an analysis of data partitioning and packet sizes as a prelude to considering scheduling regimes. The combination of adaptive channel coding and prioritized packetization for error resilience with packet-size dependent packet scheduling results in a robust streaming scheme specialized for broadband wireless and real-time streaming applications such as video conferencing, video telephony, and telemedicine.