Real-time scheduling supporting VCR functionality for scalable video streaming

Digital video cassette recording (VCR) functionality enables quick and user friendly browsing of multimedia content, thus is highly desirable in streaming video application. In this paper, we propose a layer-based implementation scheme and a layer-based soft real-time scheduling algorithm for efficient implementation of scalable streaming video system to provide full VCR functionality over a dynamic wireless network. Scalable streams provide a layer-based representation for transmitting media contents. Besides the real-time constraint, unequal priorities of scalable streams at different layers and frames are taken into account to support VCR functionality in the proposed algorithms. Thus, the better usage of available bandwidth and smoother playback can be achieved in the streaming system. Simulated results show that, with the proposed algorithms, the playback quality can be efficiently improved.