Reliable and smooth fine granular scalable video streaming

For streaming applications over Internet, reliable and smooth playback over unreliable and time-varying channel is always a cause of significant concern. Thus in this paper one streaming server architecture together with a Quality Weighted Control Scheme (QWCS) based on MPEG4 version-4 is proposed for Fine Granular Scalable (FGS) video streaming. There are two parts in our scheme: Quality Weighted Bit Allocation (QWBA) and Quality Weighted Error Control (QWEC). QWBA is able to achieve a consistent playback quality by allocating enhance-layer stream based on a theoretical analysis. And a priority definition considering both layer and quality factors is first proposed in QWEC which provides fine grained loss protection strategy for FGS stream as well as a better tradeoff between prefetching and retransmission. Simulation results show the excellent performance of our scheme oil both packet-loss resilience and playback quality smoothness.