Practical Channel-adaptive Video Streaming with Fountain Codes

Video streaming over the Internet and packet-based wireless networks is sensitive to packet loss, which can severely damage the quality of the received video. Application-layer forward error correction is commonly used to protect the transmitted video data against packet loss. However, since network conditions are unpredictable, deter-mining the right amount of redundancy introduced by the channel encoder is not obvious. This paper presents a practical implementation of a unicast video streaming system that solves this problem by using a rateless code and receiver feedback. In real simulations over the Internet our solution outperformed a standard approach based on fixed-rate forward err-or correction. For an Internet connection Konstanz-Beijing-Konstanz and the standard Foreman sequence compressed with the H.264 video coder, the gain in average peak signal to noise ratio exceeded 3.5 decibels at 90 kilobits per second.