Quality Reservation in Video Communications: Subband Coding and Resource Management

Multimedia data transmission is becoming a popular application in computer communications. Compared with digital media such as audio or text, real-time video is the most difficult medium for a communication system to handle. The difficulties lie, in part, in the strict end-to-end delay requirements of this medium. It is desirable to maintain a specified quality during a video session. To guarantee this quality, the system handling the video communication eeds a coding scheme that adapts easily to the capacity of the computer system, and the system needs the ability to reserve the capacity necessary for the coding scheme. This thesis discusses these requirements. The effective use of subband coding of video frames is studied, and resource managers are proposed to support the image quality reservation. Finally, the performance of the resource managers implemented on a real-time operating system, Advanced Real-Time System(ARTS), is described.