Bit allocation for scalable video streaming over mobile wireless Internet

With the convergence of wired line Internet and mobile wireless networks as well as tremendous demand on video application in mobile wireless Internet, it's essential to design an effective video streaming protocol and an efficient resource allocation scheme for video delivery over wireless Internet. In this paper, we employ WMSTFP, an end-to-end TCP-friendly multimedia streaming protocol, to detect the status of the wired and wireless part of the wireless Internet, where only the last hop is wireless link. By accurately distinguishing the packet losses due to transmission errors from the congestive losses and smoothing out the pathologic round-trip-time values caused by the highly dynamic wireless environment, in WMSTFP higher throughput in wireless Internet can be achieved and rate can be adjusted in a smooth and TCP-friendly manner. Based upon WMSTFP, we propose a novel loss pattern differentiated bit allocation scheme while applying unequal loss protection (ULP) for scalable video streaming over wireless Internet. Specifically, a Rate-Distortion (R-D) based bit allocation scheme which considers both wired and wireless network status is proposed to minimize the expected end-to-end distortion. The optimal solution of global optimization for the bit allocation scheme is obtained by a local search algorithm taking the characteristics of Progressive Fine Granularity Scalable (PFGS) video into account. Analytical and simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed schemes.