TCP-friendly layered video transmission for the Internet multicast application is investigated in this research. To adapt the available bandwidth in a TCP-friendly manner, a receiver-driven rate adaptation approach based on layered video is used. The receiver adjusts its number of subscription layer based upon the TCP-throughput estimation obtained from our previous work known as smooth and fast rate adaption mechansim(SFRAM). Since SFRAM mitigates unnecessary rate fluctuation and responds only to distinct network variations, a receiver can add or drop a certain number of video layers in a very stable manner. Furthermore, we apply the priority dropping mechanism (PDM) to protect the video layer selectively. To achieve fairness among different flows with PDM, we propose a new packet classification scheme (PCS) to assign the priority to each layer based upon the target rate. Since proposed PCS can also distinguish the priority for packets even within the same layer, it is suitable for Internet video multicast. With PCS, we implement PDM on the random early dropping (RED) queue to drop packets of the lowest priority layer so that end users may avoid instant error propagation. We conduct NS simulations to examine the proposed layer adaptation behavior and the effect of PDM. Our results show that SFRAM is effective enough to direct the right number of subscription layer stably while it behaves in a TCP-friendly manner. Furthermore, PDM on RED can protect layered video of the highest priority effectively with proposed PCS.

Date Published: 4 January 2002
PDF: 12 pages
Proc. SPIE 4671, Visual Communications and Image Processing 2002, (4 January 2002); doi: 10.1117/12.453014

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 4671:
Visual Communications and Image Processing 2002
C.-C. Jay Kuo, Editor(s)