Robust real-time transmission of scalable multimedia for heterogeneous client bandwidths

For robust real-time transmission of scalable image and video data over packet-loss networks, a commonly used approach is FEC-based multiple description coding, which protects a scalable bitstream with a fixed number of packets of equal length. In this paper, by considering the problem of applying this approach of multicasting a source to a collection of clients with heterogeneous bandwidths, we propose a novel technique that changes packet length but fixes packet number. In one scenario where different clients access the server via separate links, we study the sensitivity of an optimal solution to the change of packet length, and propose a local search procedure which refines the already computed optimal solutions for other bandwidths. Compared to the scheme that computes an optimal solution individually for each bandwidth, this procedure can achieve comparable performance, however with quite lower time complexity, thus can be used in real-time applications. In another scenario where many clients share a bottleneck link, we present an embedded packetization framework for layered multiple description coding, in which even simple methods with low complexities can achieve good performance. We also propose a local search algorithm to optimize the weighted average performance in case of two layers, and a fast heuristic algorithm which can achieve very good performance tradeoff among all clients in case of more than two layers. r 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.