Multi-session transmission of H.264/MVC over heterogeneous IP networks

The use of interview prediction and hierarchical pictures in the Multiview Video Coding (MVC) extension of the H.264 Advance Video Coding (AVC) standard produces better compression efficiency in multi-view video. This however, results in a bitstream that is considerably more prone to transmission errors than its simulcast coding counterpart. In this paper, we present an experimental evaluation of the transmission of MVC coded multi-view video over multiple RTP sessions. Our results show that by separating the transmission of frames based on their level of importance and protecting the important streams, we can minimise the effect of transmission errors in the hierarchical B frames. We also discuss the use of multi-session transmission in delivering a more adaptable bitstream where the number of streams can be adjusted based on the network conditions. In extreme circumstances all but the base view stream can be dropped to avoid further congesting the network and to deliver at least one high quality view to the end user.