An adaptive multi-layer low-latency transmission scheme for H.264 based screen sharing system

Virtual screen system is becoming an essential part in the mobile cloud computing platform. However, designing a low-latency interactive communication for the high-resolution screen content is still challenging due to the network dynamics and the unique characteristics of screen content. In this paper we propose a H.264 based low-latency screen sharing system. To achieve high play-out frame rate, we decouple the low-latency screen content communication problem into two parts, a scalable H.264 based encoding and an optimal scalable stream transmission scheduling. By leveraging the unique characteristics of screen content, a multi-layer scalable video encoding scheme is designed to achieve a certain error resilience while keeping good video coding efficiency. In the transmission scheduling module, an optimal frame skipping policy is proposed to schedule the frames in the buffer to maximize the play-out frame rate. In the performance evaluation, we simulate our system in both one-hop end-to-end topology and two-hop proxy-based topology. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves much better performance on frame rate and average delay, especially in the low bandwidth condition.