Resource allocation for audio and video streaming over the Internet

Streaming of compressed audio and video (AV) over the Internet is a very challenging task since the current Internet only provides best-effort services and lacks Quality of Service (QoS) guarantee. This paper addresses resource allocation of multiple compressed AV streams delivered over the Internet to achieve end-to-end optimal quality. A multimedia streaming TCP-friendly transport protocol (MSTFP) is proposed to adaptively estimate the network bandwidth and smooth the sending rate. The resources are then allocated dynamically according to the media encoding distortion and network degradation. MPEG-4 streams with multiple video objects are used in the simulation to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.