Rate-distortion optimized network communication using general MDC

Efficient delivery scheme for multimedia content is critical for the quality of various multimedia network services. It has been shown that the joint design of the source coding techniques and network communication strategies for multimedia streaming can outperform the traditional separate design in a rate-distortion measure. In this paper, we show that current joint design framework in which a data flow optimization followed by a balanced multiple description coding (MDC) can be further improved by allowing more general MDC techniques. A new general MDC construction algorithm is proposed, and the simulation results show a significant performance improvement over the previous balanced MDC based algorithm.