Trading Delay for Distortion in One-Way Video Communication over the Internet

We study the problem of one-way video communication in single-source, multiple-destination scenario over the lossy Internet. Forward Error Correction (FEC) coding is commonly adopted for data protection in implementing loss-resilient video transmission systems. However, the burst packet losses over the Internet frequently degrade the FEC performance and induce video quality deteriorations. To address the challenging problem, we propose a novel transmission scheme dubbed Trading dELay FOR Distortion (TELFORD) that includes three components: 1) adaptive multi-destination status estimation; 2) delay-constrained transmission rate assignment; 3) differentiated FEC packets spreading. We analytically formulate and solve the problem of FEC packets allocation and scheduling to minimize the endto- end video distortion. The proposed TELFORD is able to cope with multiple-destination scheduling separately. We conduct the performance evaluation through semi-physical emulations in Exata using real-time H.264 video streaming. Experimental results show that TELFORD outperforms existing error control transmission schemes in improving the video PSNR (Peak Signalto- Noise Ratio) and mitigating packet transmission impairments.