Multi-stream partitioning and parity rate allocation of scalable video content for efficient IPTV delivery

We address the joint problem of clustering heterogenous clients and allocating scalable video source rate and FEC redundancy in IPTV systems. We propose a streaming solution that delivers varying portions of the scalably encoded content to different client subsets, together with suitably selected parity data. We formulate an optimization problem where the receivers are clustered depending on the quality of their connection so that the average video quality in the IPTV system is maximized. Then we propose a novel algorithm for determining optimally the client clusters, the source and parity rate allocation to each cluster, and the set of serving rates at which the source+parity data is delivered to the clients. We implement our system through a novel design based on scalable video coding that allows for much more efficient network utilization relative to the case of source versioning. Through simulations we demonstrate that the proposed solution substantially outperforms baseline IPTV schemes that multicast the same source and FEC streams to the whole client population, as is commonly done in practice today

A survey on buffer and rate adaptation optimization in TCP-based streaming media studies

Contrary to the popular conventional wisdom that the best transport protocol for the streaming media is UDP, many findings found that most of the transport protocols used nowadays are TCP. Two main reasons that UDP is not being used widely are it is not friendly to other flows and some organizations are blocking this protocol. In the meantime,TCP is naturally reliable and friendly to other flows. But with so many controls inbuilt in the protocol; such as congestion control, flow control, and others with the heavy acknowledgement mechanism, resulting delays and jitters.Thus it’s naturally not friendly to the streaming media.But with all the inherited weaknesses, we have seen explosive growth of streaming media in the Internet. With these contrasting premises, it is very interesting to study and investigate the streaming media via TCP transport protocol,specifically on buffer and rate adaptation optimization

Network coding: from theory to media streaming

Network coding has recently emerged as an alternative to traditional routing algorithms in communication systems. In network coding, the network nodes can combine the packets they receive before forwarding them to the neighbouring nodes. Intensive research efforts have demonstrated that such a processing in the network nodes can provide advantages in terms of throughput or robustness. These potentials, combined with the advent of ad hoc and wireless delivery architectures have triggered the interest of research community about the application of the network coding principles to streaming applications. This paper describes the potentials of network coding in emerging delivery architectures such as overlay or peer-to-peer networks. It overviews the principles of practical network coding algorithms and outlines the challenges posed by multimedia streaming applications. Finally, it provides a survey of the recent work on the application of network coding to media streaming applications, both in wireless or wired communication scenarios. Promising results have been demonstrated where network coding is able to bring benefits in media streaming applications. However, delay and complexity constraints are often posed as the main challenging issues that still prevent the wide-scale deployment of network coding algorithms in multimedia communication