Towards robust AV conferencing on next-generation networks

In order to enable a truly pervasive computing environment, next generation networks (including B3G and 4G) will merge the broadband wireless and wireline networking infrastructure. However, due to the tremendous complexity in administration and the unreliability of the wireless channel, provision of hard-guarantees for services on such networks will not happen in the foreseeable future. This consequently makes it particularly challenging to offer viable AV conferencing services due to their stringent synchronization, delay and data fidelity requirements. We propose in this paper a robust application-level solution for wireless mobile AV conferencing on B3G/4G networks. Expecting no special treatment from the network, we apply a novel adaptive delay and synchronization control mechanism to maintain the synchronization and reduce the latency as much as possible. We also employ a robust video coding technique that has better error-resilience capability. We investigate the performance of the proposed solution through simulations using a three-state hidden Markov chain as the generic end-to-end transport channel model. The results show that our scheme yields tight synchronization performance, relatively low end-to-end latency and satisfactory presentation quality. The scheme successfully provides a fairly robust AV conferencing service.