Scalable video coding transmission over heterogeneous networks

Abstract

Video streaming is currently occupying a huge chunk of the Internet bandwidth. This is mainly attributed to the wide variety of applications that are being transmitted over current Internet infrastructure, such as videoconferencing, mobile television (TV), Internet video streaming, and Internet Protocol TV (IPTV). These applications are generally encoded using the H.264/AVC codec which encodes the video content into a single layer stream with a fixed spatio-temporal video resolution. This poses a limitation for such applications since the same video content must be encoded into different streams in order to cater for heterogeneous devices demanding different spatio-temporal resolutions. This paper presents the performance evaluation of the recent H.264/SVC standard. The H.264/SVC encodes the video into different layers and the receiving device can decide to drop some layers in order to meet the required spatio-temporal resolution. This work shows that transmission of H.264/SVC using multicasting provides a substantial reduction in bandwidth requirement over traditional H.264/AVC. Simulation results further demonstrate that the H.264/SVC provides less congestion and is thus provides better Quality of Experience (QoE).