Trading Delay for Distortion in One-Way Video Communication Over the Internet

We study the problem of one-way video communication in a single-source, multiple-destination scenario over the lossy Internet. Forward error correction (FEC) coding is commonly adopted for data protection in implementing loss-resilient video transmission systems. However, the burst packet losses over the Internet frequently degrade FEC performance and induce video quality deteriorations. To address the challenging problem, we propose a novel transmission scheme dubbed trading delay for distortion (TELFORD) that includes three components: 1) adaptive multidestination status estimation; 2) delay-constrained transmission rate assignment; and 3) differentiated FEC packet spreading. We analytically formulate and solve the problem of FEC packet allocation and scheduling to minimize the end-to-end video distortion. The proposed TELFORD is able to cope with multiple-destination scheduling separately. We conduct performance evaluation through semiphysical emulations in Exata using real-time H.264 video streaming. Experimental results show that TELFORD outperforms existing error control transmission schemes in improving the video peak signal-to-noise ratio and mitigating packet transmission impairments.