Implementing congestion avoidnace for network transmission of scalable video coding

In this paper we propose a congestion avoidance mechanism for the delivery of scalable video streams over IP networks. Different packets from different video layers are treated with different dropping priorities and are dropped by routers before the network experiences congestion conditions. This mechanism can largely protect higher priority traffic whilst providing bounded video quality guarantee for the video transmission. We have implemented this mechanism on a real-life test-bed that allows us to investigating the behaviour of scalable video packets transmission for various congestion levels and for different topologies with bottleneck points in the network. The experimental results confirm that dropping lower priority scalable video packets can be a feasible and effective way to address the heterogeneity of network resources.