Proximate control stream assisted video transcoding for heterogeneous content delivery network

Video transcoding can be used to facilitate video streaming in content delivery network. A concept of control stream assisted transcoding has been recently proposed aiming to reduce transcoding computational complexity at the cost of data storage/transmission overhead, and the control stream is obtained by directly removing the residual information from the target video bitstream of transcoding. However, it is subject to relatively significant storage/transmission overhead, and more importantly does not well match to the increasingly heterogeneous networking environment with varying computation/storage/transmission resources at different nodes. This work presents a proximate control stream assisted transcoding design strategy that can reduce the control stream size and enable a large storage/transmission vs. computational complexity trade-off design space. Experiments demonstrate its effectiveness and noticeable advantages over other alternatives including simulcast and SVC (scalable video coding).