Reliable and Efficient Adaptive Streaming Mechanism for Multi-user SVC VoD System over GPRS/EDGE Network

In this paper we propose and then implement a novel H.264/AVC Scalable Video Coding multi-user video-on-demand system for hand-held devices over GPRS/EDGE network. We design a reliable and efficient adaptive streaming mechanism for QoS support. The major contributions come from three folds: firstly, accumulation-based congestion control model is used for bandwidth estimation to ensure fairness among all the users. Secondly, for the purpose of handling time-varying bitrate, we propose a PLS algorithm which performs rate adaptation as well as optimizes the video quality in a R-D sense under the bandwidth constraint. Finally, to minimize adaptation delay, IDR frames are online inserted in the pre-encoded stream at the server by using transcoding. Furthermore, to improve system userspsila overall performance, transmission of packets is optimally scheduled through exploiting the multi-user diversity. More importantly, a practical system was implemented and further tested over existing GPRS/EDGE network deployed in China. The results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism achieves outstanding performance in terms of higher perceived video quality, smoother video playback, higher utilization of wireless link and fairer share of resources, compared to RTP Usage Model defined in 3 GPP Release7.