Relay-assisted hierarchical adaptation scheme for multi-user scalable video delivery to heterogeneous mobile devices

In multi-user video (MUV) delivery scenarios, the available resources of receiver devices, such as processing capability, link packet error rate (PER), and bandwidth, are usually different. We propose a relay-assisted hierarchical adaptation (RHA) scheme to maximize the total perceptual quality of all users when transmitting video streams coded via scalable video coding (SVC). First, MUV bitstreams are adaptively extracted under the constraints of network bandwidth and individual decoding capacity. Next, the relay links are introduced as substitutes of possible bad direct links for packets retransmissions. Approximately equal opportunity of transmission is allocated to each stream while the packets inside a stream are scheduled according to their priorities. The priorities are determined by the links states and packets loss distortions. Simulation results show that our RHA scheme has significant performance improvements compared with other schemes.