Architecture of a home gateway for three-screen TV

This paper describes the design and implementation of a multimedia home gateway for three-screen TV service. The proposed in-home wireless network uses scalable video coding (SVC) and unequal error protection with Raptor forward error correction (FEC) for maximizing the quality of experience (QoE) over the variable-bandwidth, error-prone wireless network. The gateway incorporates (a) dynamic SVC layer-switching, which enables the server to perform selecting appropriate layers from SVC bitstreams, (b) adaptive Raptor FEC, which controls the overhead of Raptor FEC according to packet loss rate (PLR), (c) an efficient combination of (a) and (b). The paper explains the home gateway architecture as well as experiments for performance evaluation as compared to that of traditional SVC streaming. In the experiments conducted, gains in video quality vary from 2 to 5 dB in peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), with corresponding subjective improvements. Overall reductions of bit rate at the input to the home gateway vary from 28% to 36%.