Wyner–Ziv Video Compression and Fountain Codes for Receiver-Driven Layered Multicast

The increasing popularity of video streaming applications that distribute data to a large number of clients motivates the design of reliable multimedia delivery systems capable of adapting to diverse transmission conditions. Receiver-driven layered multicast (RLM) efficiently addresses the issue of heterogeneity in clients' available bandwidths and packet loss rates by shifting rate control to the receiver side. We propose a system for RLM over the Internet and 3G wireless networks based on layered Wyner-Ziv video coding and digital fountain codes. Layered Wyner-Ziv video coding improves robustness to packet loss compared to current scalable video coders, such as MPEG-4 FGS coder, while generating a scalable output bit stream. Digital fountain codes are near-capacity erasure protection codes that are ideally suited for multicast applications due to their rateless property. By combining an error-resilient Wyner-Ziv video coder and rateless fountain codes, our system allows reliable video multicast to an arbitrary number of heterogeneous receivers without the requirement of feedback channels. Simulation results show performance improvements over a previous scheme that exploits multiple description and layered coding.