A Multi-channel HD Video Streaming in Digital Community Network: Video Rate Adaptation and Playback Adjustment

In this paper, we propose design and implementation of a practical end-to-end system which implements multi-channel digital television (DTV) multicasting to the home over broadband community access network using sender-driven video rate adaptation and receiver-driven playback adjustment. For video rate adaptation, we employ Program Clock Reference (PCR) embedded in the MPEG-2 transport stream (TS) to enhance packet timing control precision and regulate the transmission rate in a refined way. At the same time, we integrate Traffic Control (TC) ingeniously to separate streams of multiple channels at the network card of DTV server and thus avoid bandwidth competition between them. For playback adjustment, we introduce control theory and over-boundary strategy to reduce buffer jitter and maximize the visual quality of displayed video according to the receiver buffer occupancy. We test our system with standard definition (SD) and high definition (HD) MPEG-2 streams and find that the proposed algorithms can reduce overflow and underflow of sender and receiver buffer, and achieve better video quality and more concurrent channels than traditional solutions.