An end-to-end testbed for scalable video streaming to mobile devices over HTTP

We design, implement, and evaluate an H.264/SVC decoder and an HTTP video streaming client on multi-core mobile devices. The decoder employs multiple decoder threads to leverage the multi-core CPUs, and the streaming server/client support adaptive HTTP video streaming. To evaluate the decoder performance, we conduct experiments using real H.264/SVC videos on a tablet and a smart phone running Android 4.0. Our experimental results demonstrate that real-time H.264/SVC decoding is feasible on multi-core mobile devices. For example, for 960×544 videos, our decoder achieves up to 20.72 FPS (Frame-Per-Second), and for 480×272 videos, it achieves up to 42.03 FPS. We also conduct extensive HTTP video streaming experiments over live WiFi and 3G cellular networks, which show that high frame rate (up to ~42 FPS), and short initial delay (as small as ~2.5 sec) are possible. We make our testbed publicly available to the research communities.