Quality-aware centralized bitrate allocation for live video streams over wireless uplink

To improve the reconstruction quality of live video streams over wireless uplink, a quality-aware centralized bitrate allocation scheme is presented according to the source and channel information. By jointly exploiting H.264 rate control tools, the multi-stream uplink architecture is designed to dynamically distribute the uplink bandwidth of live video streams. To ensure efficiency and fairness of multi-stream bitrate allocation, the compound quality assessment is introduced to estimate both worst-case and average-case reconstruction quality of multiple quasi-concurrent groups-of-pictures (GOP). With a non-intrusive quality prediction metric, the proposed scheme can find out an optimal allocation policy for each super-GOP under the given bandwidth constraints. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can effectively enhance the overall compound quality of live video streams over lossy uplink, and thus achieve a fine balance in reconstruction quality across all received videos.