Selective Redundant Transmissions for Real-Time Video Streaming over Multi-Interface Wireless Terminals

Real-time video communications has been incorporated into many instant communication tools such as ichat, Skype, QQ, etc. Real-time video communications has low delivery delay requirement, which imposes great challenge to the provisioning of such services. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a selective redundant transmission mechanism to support real-time streaming on multi-interface wireless terminals. This mechanism selectively duplicates some video frames according to the tightness of their lifetimes and further schedule their transmissions (or some of them) via neighbors' assistance. We build a model to select the optimal encoding rate and also the optimal per-frame copy number in order to maximize the peak signal noise ratio (PSNR) of video streaming service when maximal allowable total traffic rate is given. Numerical results show that the proposed mechanism can significantly improve the PSNR of real-time video streaming as compared with existing work.