A novel unbalanced multiple description coder for robust video transmission over ad hoc wireless networks

Feng Huang; Lifeng Sun; Yuzhuo Zhong

doi:10.1117/12.643617

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16 January 2006 A novel unbalanced multiple description coder for robust video transmission over ad hoc wireless networks

Feng Huang, Lifeng Sun, Yuzhuo Zhong

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Proceedings Volume 6071, Multimedia Computing and Networking 2006; 607108 (2006) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.643617
Event: Electronic Imaging 2006, 2006, San Jose, California, United States

Abstract

Robust transmission of live video over ad hoc wireless networks presents new challenges: high bandwidth requirements are coupled with delay constraints; even a single packet loss causes error propagation until a complete video frame is coded in the intra-mode; ad hoc wireless networks suffer from bursty packet losses that drastically degrade the viewing experience. Accordingly, we propose a novel UMD coder capable of quickly recovering from losses and ensuring continuous playout. It uses 'peg' frames to prevent error propagation in the High-Resolution (HR) description and improve the robustness of key frames. The Low-Resolution (LR) coder works independent of the HR one, but they can also help each other recover from losses. Like many UMD coders, our UMD coder is drift-free, disruption-tolerant and able to make good use of the asymmetric available bandwidths of multiple paths. The simulation results under different conditions show that the proposed UMD coder has the highest decoded quality and lowest probability of pause when compared with concurrent UMDC techniques. The coder also has a comparable decoded quality, lower startup delay and lower probability of pause than a state-of-the-art FEC-based scheme. To provide robustness for video multicast applications, we propose non-end-to-end UMDC-based video distribution over a multi-tree multicast network. The multiplicity of parents decorrelates losses and the non-end-to-end feature increases the throughput of UMDC video data. We deploy an application-level service of LR description reconstruction in some intermediate nodes of the LR multicast tree. The principle behind this is to reconstruct the disrupted LR frames by the correctly received HR frames. As a result, the viewing experience at the downstream nodes benefits from the protection reconstruction at the upstream nodes.

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Feng Huang, Lifeng Sun, and Yuzhuo Zhong "A novel unbalanced multiple description coder for robust video transmission over ad hoc wireless networks", Proc. SPIE 6071, Multimedia Computing and Networking 2006, 607108 (16 January 2006); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.643617

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