Near-optimal multipath streaming of H.264 using reference frame selection

New video coding standards such as H.264 offer the flexibility to select from a number of reference frames for motion-estimation for a given predicted frame. In this paper, we propose an optimization algorithm using dynamic programming that exploits this flexibility for multipath streaming simultaneously streaming over two transmission paths with different bandwidths and loss rates. A rounding technique is employed to scale the complexity of the algorithm down at the cost of degrading solution quality. Results show significant streaming quality improvement over a conventional multiple description scheme.