Rate-distortion optimized dynamic bitstream switching for scalable video streaming

Bitstream switching is an effective way to deal with bandwidth variation in transmitting multimedia over time-varying channels such as the Internet or wireless networks. Most of previous work has focused on how to switch to reduce the potential error drift, without necessarily taking into account the impact of the switching on the bandwidth and delay requirements. This paper proposes a rate-distortion optimized dynamic bitstream switching algorithm that explicitly takes into account the impact of the switching on both drifting effect and bandwidth requirement. The rate control (or switching decision) of the proposed algorithm explicitly takes into account the delay constraint of multimedia applications, using an integrated end-to-end virtual network buffer management approach. Initial results show that it can achieve good performance with well-controlled quality drift and delay, and provides a promising research direction.