Protocols for distributed video streaming

With the explosive growth of video applications over the packet switched networks, many approaches have been proposed to stream video effectively over packet switched, best-effort networks. In our previous work, we proposed a framework with a receiver driven protocol to coordinate simultaneous video streaming from multiple senders to a single receiver in order to achieve higher throughput, and to increase tolerance to packet loss and delay due to network congestion. The receiver-driven protocol employs two algorithms: the rate allocation and packet partition. The rate allocation algorithm determines the sending rate for each sender, while the packet partition algorithm ensures no sender sends the same packets, and at the same time, minimizes the probability of late packets. In this paper, we extend the rate allocation scheme to be used with Forward Error Correction (FEC) in order to minimize the probability of packet loss in a bursty loss environment such as one due to network congestion. Using both simulations and actual Internet experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our rate allocation scheme in reducing packet loss, and hence, achieving higher visual quality for the streamed video.