Source characteristics based fast bitstream switching

Bitstream switching is an effective way to deal with the bandwidth variation issue in transmitting multimedia over the Internet or wireless networks. This paper proposes a fast intelligent bitstream switching algorithm that avoids the problem of long delay and high complexity that often occurred in prior solutions. We show that it can achieve very close performance as an off-line MSE-optimized bitstream switching solution, with well-controlled quality drift. It is especially useful in the scenario of real-time multicasting over heterogeneous networks, where multiple bitstreams with different bitrates are generated on the fly and dynamic bitstream switching is required for individual clients.