A Hybrid Scheme of the Transport Error Control for SVC Video Streaming

In this paper, we propose a practical hybrid transport error control scheme to provide SVC video streaming service over error-prone IP networks. Many error control mechanisms for various video coding standards have been proposed in the literature. However, there is little research result which can be practically applicable to the multilayered coding structure of SVC(the scalable extension of H.264/AVC). We present a new hybrid transport error control scheme that efficiently combines layered Forward Error Correction(FEC) and Automatic Repeat Request(ARQ) for better packet-loss resilience. In the proposed hybrid error control, we adopt ACK-based ARQ instead of NACK-based ARQ to maximize throughput which is the amount of effective data packets delivered over a physical link per time unit. In order to prove the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid error control scheme, we adopt NIST-Net network emulator which is a general-purpose tool for emulating performance dynamics in IP networks. It is shown by simulations over the NIST-Net that the proposed hybrid error control scheme shows improved packet-loss resilience even with much less number of overhead packets compared to various conventional error control schemes.