Overhead and Quality Measurements for Multiple Description Coding for Video Services

Multiple description coding (MDC) has received a lot of interest lately, because it allows to split one source of information in multiple entities, where each of the entities is decodable in a stand–alone fashion. The more of these entities are received the more information of the original source can be restored. This opens the door for new applications in many fields of mobile communications. Unfortunately the multiple description coding comes with the price of higher bandwidth requirements. This overhead is caused by the coding process itself and the related network transport. In this work we present a solid investigation of the overhead arising from the splitting process for video coding. The overhead caused by the underlying network protocols is highlight. Furthermore we investigate the quality of the decoded video in absence of specific streams. A main conclusion we draw here is that we have to consider the scenario carefully whether or not multiple description coding should be chosen over single description coding. Keywords— MDC, overhead measurements, PSNR, H.26L, H.263, CIF, QCIF