Rate control for real-time video network transmission on end-to-end rate-distortion and application-oriented QoS

In the merged multimedia packet-switched networks, the limited or no end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees induce that rate control has been evolved to joint source-channel adjustment architecture based on application-oriented QoS. Based on the statistical analysis under the spatial intra and temporal inter prediction subject to a universal spatial-temporal coding framework and a general error concealment by the decoder, an end-to-end distortion estimation model is proposed. On the basis of the analytic model, this paper fulfills a picture quality parameters selection solution with rate-distortion (R-D) Lagrange optimization for a general coding engine including H.264/AVC, exploiting either the source-driven iterative prediction or feedback recursion. Further, a corresponding joint source-channel rate control strategy is proposed. For the real-time variable bit-rate (VBR) video transmission under a given time-varying network condition, the strategy could estimate an instantaneous available transmission rate on traffic smoothing and codec's buffer control, adopt the proposed an end-to-end distortion regressive model and a global optimal error control parameters selection, and address the consistent bit allocation in group of picture (GOP) level, picture level, and MB level. The extensive network simulation experiments show a better and more consistent end-to-end picture quality, in contrast with the locally optimal control strategy at MB level.