MDC and path diversity in video streaming

Delivering multimedia content over the network pose several challenges that include higher bandwidth and sensitivity to packet losses resulting due to congestion and/or transmission errors. Multiple description coding (MDC) is one of the source coding approaches to alleviate the problems of packet loss in a network since MDC splits the source information into several descriptions which can then be transmitted over several paths in the network. Parallel delivery of descriptions over multiple paths should guarantee better quality of transmission. In this paper we investigate the performance of a generalized MDC scheme over multi-path and single path scenarios and compare its performance to a layered single description (SDC) scheme. In the multi-path case, multimedia content is delivered via k-shortest paths that are selected on the basis of the packet loss probability of overall links in that path. Our experimental results show that MDC scheme always outperforms the SDC scheme in terms of PSNR quality for both single and multi-path transmissions. The improvement varies from 7 dB at (5% packet loss) to 13 dB at (20% packet loss) for the single path and by 3 dB to 9 dB respectively for the multi-path transmission.