A rate-distortion optimized error control scheme for scalable video streaming over the Internet

Video streaming over the Internet is a challenging task due, in part to the wide range of bandwidth variations caused by network congestion. To deal with this challenge, we propose an optimal error control scheme for scalable video transmission over the Internet. The three major components of error controlerror resilience, forward error correction (FEC), and error concealment- are considered in the proposed framework. Rate-distortion (R-D) optimization is carried out to determine the encoding mode for each packet and the channel coding rates, in order to minimize the overall expected end-to-end distortion. Our simulation study demonstrates that the proposed approach is robust to the wide range channel bandwidth variations and greatly outperforms the classical R-D optimization scheme.