Streaming MPEG-4 audio visual objects using TCP-friendly rate control and unequal error protection

This article describes a fair and robust video streaming framework over IP networks. It is based on an MPEG-4 audio-visual object (AVOs) classification, TCP-friendly transport and out-of-band unequal forward error protection. According to network congestion feedback, video source servers dynamically adjust their bit rates by adding and dropping MPEG-4 AVO to conform to the TCP-friendly rate control (TFRC) algorithm and by taking into consideration media semantic relevancy. Thus, an accurate MPEG-4 access unit (AU) partitioning and packetization can be performed to cope with decoding error propagation and network bandwidth fluctuation. Finally, AVOs requiring similar network QoS level are automatically classified, packetized and mapped to one of the available EP DiffServ PHB (per hop behaviors). Simulation results show a significant improvement regarding to user-perceived video quality, packet loss recovery and bandwidth share fairness.