User-Oriented Qualitative Communication for JPEG/MPEG Packet Transmission

The existing Internet treats all packets equally, which means that a packet can be dropped entirely due to network congestion. To address this issue, a new packetization scheme and transport paradigm called Qualitative Communication, along with its associated packet wash operation, have been proposed. Qualitative Communication is particularly beneficial for transmitting multimedia content in the presence of network congestion. This paper specifically focuses on the transmission of JPEG/MPEG packets and investigates the characteristics of the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) used in the JPEG/MPEG encoding process. The proposed encoding scheme organizes the quantization coefficients of all image blocks in a packet based on their significance for image decoding and reconstruction. Additionally, the paper explores the idea that end users may be willing to accept a certain level of quality degradation rather than receiving nothing at all within an expected time frame. The benefits provided by the proposed mechanisms are discussed, and simulation results validate the improvements in the successful packet delivery ratio and the end user's level of satisfaction.