Adaptive VBR video for congested wireless home networks

2004 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (IEEE Cat. No.04TH8733), 2004

The rapid growth of wireless LAN (WLAN) deployments will bring about many novel mobile applications. Among them will be real-time multimedia streaming applications running on UDP, which may interfere with current data applications running on TCP. This paper is a first attempt to investigate how to ensure the performance of these two groups of applications when they co-exist over a WLAN. Toward this end, we have designed and implemented a UDP rate adaptation scheme called Adaptive-Buffer Rate Control (ABRC) for multimedia streaming over WLAN. ABRC has two distinguishing features compared with other schemes: 1) It can achieve arbitrary bandwidth allocations between UDP and TCP in the WLAN, as opposed to previously proposed "TCP friendly" schemes, which can only achieve uniform bandwidth allocations; 2) The majority of previously proposed flexible bandwidth-allocation schemes achieve arbitrary bandwidth allocations by prioritizing and scheduling packet transmissions within network equipment (i.e., within routers, base stations, etc.). In contrast, ABRC is an end-to-end application-layer solution that does not require changes to current WLAN products, making it more readily deployable over existing networks.

2010

With increasing implementation of broadband wireless networks and extensive deployment of multimedia services such as Video on Demand (VoD) or IPTV, the demand for video streaming applications will increase and more people will use their wireless devices to reach numerous video contents available in the Internet. Streaming real-time video in wireless networks is a challenging problem due to the stringent service requirements of video traffic and impairments of wireless channels. Providing the required Quality of Service (QoS) through efficient resource allocation is a complicated problem that service providers are confronting. In this paper, we propose a traffic-aware, crosslayer solution for enhancing the perceived video quality at the end user in wireless networks. Our solution incorporates the characteristics of the MPEG traffic to give more priority to the more important frames and to protect them against dropping when available resources of the network are not sufficient for providing the desired QoS to the traffic flow. It is shown that the proposed solution will improve the perceived video quality over the broadband wireless networks.

Proceedings of the International Conference on Signal Processing and Multimedia Applications and Wireless Information Networks and Systems, 2012

In order to improve quality of streaming services in broadband wireless networks, many researches are in progress. However, existing schemes do not guarantee a user perceived quality, because most of these schemes do not consider both wireless channel states and video characteristics. To cope with these problems, this paper proposes a NB-RC (Network and Buffer-aware Rate Control) scheme. The proposed scheme adjusts the video transmission rate according to the wireless channel states. It also controls the video quality based on buffer occupancy of clients. Through the simulation results, we prove that our scheme improves the media quality.

Circuits and Systems for Video …, 2007

Abstract—The perceived video quality in a wireless streaming application strongly depends on the channel's dynamics and the fluctuations of the source bit rate. In this paper, we introduce two channel-adaptive rate control schemes for slowly and fast varying channels, ...

A large portion of the emerging and future wireless Internet traffic is foreseen to be consumed by video streams. However, delivering video over wireless networks poses a lot of challenges. Network congestion and wireless channel errors yield tremendous packet loss leading to degraded video quality. One of the most critical issues for video applications is to ensure that the quality of service (QoS) requirement will be maintained at an acceptable level, providing responsiveness to the time-variant network conditions as well as scalability and fairness among concurrent users. In this paper, we study the performance of a novel fuzzybased adaptive mechanism which takes into account a combination of Network Adaptation Techniques with Content Adaptation Techniques in order to achieve graceful performance degradation when network load increases and network conditions deteriorate. Our performance evaluations indicate that our approach finely adapts the video stream bit rate to the available bandwidth, maintains responsiveness to dynamic changes and achieves scalability and fairness as well as high and stable objective quality of service.

2007 IEEE 65th Vehicular Technology Conference - VTC2007-Spring, 2007

For multimedia streaming over wireless networks, there is a trade-off between the capacity of the wireless links and the end-user perceived-quality, which can be affected by the compression scheme used, content characteristics and adaptation algorithm (if any). In this paper, this trade-off is investigated for streaming various motion content multimedia over an IEEE 802.11b-based Wireless-Home Area Network using the Quality-Oriented Adaptation Scheme (QOAS). QOAS performance is compared to that of a non-adaptive scheme when using MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 encoding in terms of average end-user perceived quality, number of streaming sessions concurrently supported, loss rate, delay, jitter and total throughput. Simulation results show that by using QOAS and MPEG-4 encoded streams a much higher number of concurrent streams are supported at an average quality above "good" level on the ITU-T five-point quality scale in comparison with other situations. In this case all the other streaming performance parameters were also significantly better.

2003

We consider streaming of video sequences over both, constant and variable bitrate (VBR) channels. Our goal is to enable decoding of each video unit before exceeding its displaying deadline and, hence, to guarantee successful sequence presentation even if the media rate does not match the channel rate. In this work, we will show that the separation between a delay jitter buffer and a decoder buffer is in general sub-optimal for VBR video transmitted over VBR channel. We will define the minimum initial delay and the minimum required buffer for a given video-stream and a deterministic VBR channel. In addition, we provide some probabilistic statements in the case that we have a random behaviour of the channel bit-rate. A specific example tailored to wireless video streaming is discussed in greater details and bounds are derived which allow to guarantee a certain quality-of-service even for random VBR channels in a wireless environment. Simulation results validate the findings.

Signal Processing: Image Communication, 2004

In this study, the performance of a rate adaptive video streaming algorithm is examined under controlled packet loss rates and delays. The developed algorithm is a set of heuristics that consider the packet loss rate and receiver buffer level during the adaptation decision. The algorithm is content aware in such a way that it employs quality or temporal scaling, or both, in accordance with the amount of motion in a scene. Extensive periodic and non-periodic packet loss scenarios are implemented to examine the behavior of the algorithm. It has been observed that the algorithm reacts to congestion by reducing its data rate and maintain interrupt-free display even if the continuous packet loss rate approaches 15%. The results of this study confirm the suitability of our algorithm for Internet video streaming where congestion can occur any time unpredictably.

2007 IEEE International Conference on Communications, 2007

In this paper, we propose a new streaming protocol, namely Dynamic Video Rate Control (DVRC), which enables adaptive video delivery over the Internet. DVRC operates on top of UDP providing a congestion-controlled flow of unreliable datagrams. The proposed rate control scheme is able to interact with new and existing video streaming applications which are capable of adjusting their rate based on congestion feedback. DVRC attempts to optimize the performance of video delivery with concern to friendliness with interfering traffic. Exploring DVRC's potential through extensive simulations, we identify notable gains in terms of bandwidth utilization and smooth video delivery. Furthermore, our results indicate that the protocol allocates a well-balanced amount of network resources maintaining friendliness with coexisting flows.

This paper proposes an advanced video streaming system based on scalable video coding in order to optimize resource utilization in wireless networks with retransmission mechanisms at radio protocol level. The key component of this system is a packet scheduling algorithm which operates on the different substreams of a main scalable video stream and which is implemented in a so-called media aware network element. The concerned type of transport channel is a dedicated channel subject to parameters (bitrate, loss rate) variations on the long run. Moreover, we propose a combined scalability approach in which common temporal and SNR scalability features can be used jointly with a partitioning of the image into regions of interest. Simulation results show that our approach provides substantial quality gain compared to classical packet transmission methods and they demonstrate how ROI coding combined with SNR scalability allows to improve again the visual quality.