Forward error correction (FEC) codes based multiple description coding for internet video streaming and multicast

In this work, we describe the application of generalized multiple description (MD) source coding architected through the usage of forward error correction (FEC) codes to achieve robust and efficient Internet video streaming and multicast consistent with the existing Internet architecture. We highlight the synergistic interaction between the robust source coding and packetization strategy and an efficient as well as responsive, TCP-friendly congestion control protocol linear increase multiplicative decrease with history (LIMD/H) to achieve robust streaming over the Internet. The proposed source packetization scheme transforms a loss sensitive layered video bitstream into a robust packet stream so as to provide graceful resilience to network packet drops. The proposed congestion control mechanism provides low variation in transmission rate in steady state and at the same time is reactive and provably TCP friendly. Furthermore, exploiting the fundamental property of a multicast tree, namely, the observation that the multicast tree is a degraded channel we propose an elegant application level architecture for efficient video multicast. We exploit the amenability of the MD coding strategy to fast transcoding. Our extensive simulation studies for the streaming problem and preliminary results for the multicast case, bear out the efficacy of the proposed setup. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.