Optimal Bandwidth Assignment for Multiple Description Coding in Media Streaming

Multiple description coding (MDC) has been widely used in media streaming to address the bandwidth heterogeneity issue. That is, the video source encodes data into multiple descriptions. At the receiver end, the streaming quality is proportional to the number of descriptions received. In this paper, we investigate how to assign bandwidth for descriptions in order to make full use of available network bandwidth. We formulate the problem as an optimization problem. We then decompose the problem and address it by an iterative algorithm. We evaluate the algorithm through simulations. Our results show that arbitrary description rates may severely degrade system performance and an optimal solution can make efficient use of network bandwidth.